virtuality and knowledge in society

Friends, please find an extract here from a workshop poser, for your comments and discussion. Ongoing dialogue on these and related questions can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/knowledge-dialogue/


The New Command and the Knowledge Question


Virtual Domain

Questions related to knowledge have assumed radically new dimensions with the emergence of the virtual world.   We shall not attempt to define what is a virtual domain or a virtual world. Is it the network society? Is it the world of Internet? Is it the world of those who have access to the Internet?  Is it the world of just those who have started spending a lot of time and doing a host of activities on the Internet? Is it the new world of knowledge activity, power play and finance? We have heard of virtual community, virtual society, virtual forest, virtual experiment and what not. The idea and reality of the ‘virtual’ is in the making. The Internet (www) came into existence in 1990. So we shall not attempt a definition of the virtual. However it is already perhaps an acknowledged fact that it is now the commanding domain. The activity, development, interaction, formulation, transaction, creation, invention, discovery, collaboration, criticism etc. in the virtual world have taken lead and tend to give direction to human activity everywhere, …finance, science, art, entertainment, name any.

Knowledge in Society

            Knowledge in Society may be seen as knowledge in different locations - like the university and research institutions, monasteries of different traditions, media, artisans, peasants, ethnic social formation, social movements, ideological formations etc. These are places where people engage in a variety of activities - productive, religious, artistic, scientific and others. Their activities exhibit paradigms of knowledge that are different from one another. Another way of saying this would be they have different bodies of knowledge, with different structure and logic, values, ontologies, ways of thinking and speculation.

            Such knowledge in society, other than in universities and research institutions,  is often described as just empirical, cumulative, practice-based, and even superstitious. But then these qualifications stem from a point of view that belongs to an era, which is perhaps drawing to a close. We, who have great regard for people’s knowledge, lokavidya, or generally knowledge in society, believe that it is not in need of criteria external to it because it is embedded in the life of people at large where correctness and legitimacy has a time-testing criterion (a real life consistency and delivery criterion). But in so far as this knowledge is applied in broader contexts, these criteria themselves are open to contention and dialogue.

Hierarchy and Emaciation

            Virtuality seems to legitimize all traditions and locations of knowledge while elevating itself to a higher position from where all knowledge is sorted and organized. In the process it creates a new hierarchy in the sphere of knowledge. It is not merely a structural rearrangement of locations but entails a certain emaciation or atrophy of knowledge in society. They are now seen as places of genuine human activity only to the extent and in the manner they relate to virtuality. Can we propose a radical equality of all knowledge locations as the basis of a future democratic society which is also at peace with virtuality?


Knowledge Dialogue

           Is virtuality the new location of the unity of the ruling classes of the world? Has virtuality broken the concept of a community as a face-to-face society? Is virtuality a new reality or is virtual world only a world of representations? How do we start addressing these questions? One way perhaps is to construct a universe of knowledge dialogue that is simultaneously a political, economic, and philosophical dialogue. This requires that no strict paradigm of knowledge be allowed to govern the initial premises or the boundary conditions.

            The knowledge dialogue that we are suggesting therefore can take place in a universe of knowledge traditions and locations where none is superior or inferior to another, virtuality included, and by a method which recognizes theoretical constructs only in a mode of transcendence, that is, the method involves transcending one’s own theoretical constructs. It is in some such knowledge space that this dialogue is being proposed.

Questions

In the light of this formulation, may I pose a few questions for Polylog friends:

Does intercultural philosophy take into account different locations of knowledge in society, within a culture?
What is the location of philosophy? Is is located only in a university setting?
What is the relation of intercultural philosophy to virtuality?

Thanks,

Avinash Jha (vidyasamvad@yahoo.com)