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What is Knowledge Today?
E. Doyle McCarthy
[email protected]
The Sociology of Knowledge & Culture
• Everything that you and I know comes to us from society,
however differently we think about society and ourselves.
• This means that peoples of the world have many different ideas
and concepts and worldviews because we have grown up in
different social worlds.
There is always a social foundation to thinking.
Ideas about religion or salvation, concepts of
dirty and clean whether religious of healthrelated, and vast belief systems (religious or
scientific) about the natural universe and its
origins, all of these share an intrinsic sociality
explained by the social and political and
religious contexts in which they emerge.
Particular social groups can
also be important too, as to
what we think and what we
know, like economic elites or
religious authorities or
secular-thinking medical
doctors.
Many of these assertions about the social
foundations of thought and knowledge developed in
the 1920s in Germany in the field called the
sociology of knowledge or, in German,
Wissenssoziologie. Its framers thought they could
resolve the many battles surrounding conflicting
political ideas in Weimar, Germany after WWI. They
tried to settle these battles by looking at the social
roots of ideas and seeking for the truth-content
contained in these ideologies.
These ideas—the social roots of knowledge—have
come back to us with force in 21st Century societies,
as their citizens’ ideas from all over the world are
shaped by the knowledges that come to us from
global digital networks of media and technology
The Social Roots of Knowledge
In today’s world, more and more of us are aware of how
much our ideas are “out there” and how they are
disseminated to us by academics, journalists, photo
journalists, politicians, media consultants, and many
more groups of people who are in the
business of disseminating and
shaping ideas and images.
Today’s social
knowledges that come
to us via digital media
and technologies are
not only informational
or idea-based, they
also communicate to
us deeply personal
meanings about life
and existence that are
also emotional and
about “who we are or
want to be,” our
identities.
Unlike a century ago, knowledges are not easily located
in specific economic classes, social organizations or
institutions, at least not institutions housed in brick
and mortar.
Instead, many social scientists today look to studies
of media technologies, to studies of the differences
between print (book) culture and digital culture, and
to the fields of rhetoric and semiotics for an
understanding of the ways in which a society’s
multifarious meanings are communicated and
reproduced, how specific kinds of social
organizations order knowledges
Reactionary Politics
One of our most urgent issues today is that of the new politics of
reaction (or, political reactionary social movements) whether
among Eastern European peoples (nation-based or not), some
groups of Middle Easterners or of residents of sections of the
Midwest or South in the U.S. I am referring to new movements of
the political right that appear to many to assume the form of
counter-revolutionary or reactionary politics.
The Sociology of Knowledge
It is a perspective that moves easily between:
a) the subjective perspectives of people with
common sociocultural backgrounds (age,
race, citizenry, education, religion, etc.)
b) the ideologies and principal ideas they use to
provide the social meanings of their lives.
The Goal of the Sociology of Knowledge,
a perspective
Its goal is to understand from within a people’s own
particular group perspectives, including the important
emotional features of their politics and identities, their
feelings, for example, of ressentiment, pride, righteous
anger, economic despair, or the intense solitude of the
marginalized citizen blamed for her own illiteracy and
ignorance.
The sociology of knowledge
provides today’s social
scientists with conceptual
frameworks and tools for
uncovering new and better
explanations for how and
why social actors embrace
certain ideas and ideologies
over others, how collective
actions and ideas and
ideologies, like political
“reaction” or revolution, and
their emotional substrates,
emerge out of and are
shaped by the multiple social
contexts and positions of
their proponents and
opponents.
Sociologists of knowledge can provide empirical-causal accounts
that provide incisive explanations about the social sources of the
concepts of social life that each of us carry with us, conceptions
that bear the weight of their consequences in the worlds that we
share with others. This may be a much-needed approach for
today’s highly contentious cultural and ideological climate.
REFERENCES
Arlie Russell Hochschild. 2016. Strangers in Their Own
Land. New York: The New Press.
Mark Lilla. 2016. The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political
Reaction. New York: New York Review Books.
McCarthy, E. Doyle. 1996. Knowledge as Culture: The
New Sociology of Knowledge. NY and London:
Routledge.
__________. 2017. Emotional Lives: Dramas of Identity
in an Age of Mass Media. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Isaac Reed. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge:
On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.