Each era has had its particular relationship between knowledge and power. How are these two words related today? In other times, knowledge was the monopoly of monasteries, of kings, of libraries. Now education, at least in advanced societies, is universal. However, this does not necessarily imply more democracy, nor more freedom nor more emancipation. It is the great paradox of our time.
We had never had so much access to so much information. However, perhaps never before had we been so uncritical. Why? It is one of the effects of this massive access to information. We experience all this in a very uncritical way because we do not have contexts for evaluation. All criticism implies a relationship with a context that allows us to evaluate ideas and knowledge, to reject them, to counter-argue them. But today we receive ideas in a stream and, moreover, from tools that rather break our contexts of experience, as spectators or users of social networks. That is, we know many things of which we have not had experience nor do we know how to have it.
What characterizes the ignorance of our era and why can it be a danger for democracy? The ignorance of our era is characterized precisely by being full of knowledge. It is a very saturated ignorance. It is not a void to be filled. That is why it needs strategies of emptying: to discard everything that prevents us from seeing the world and ourselves as active subjects. And, at the same time, as we said before, it must be turned into meaningful experience. And that also implies learning to see everything we do not know among what we appear to know.
Do academic institutions continue to be the place where knowledge is disseminated and standardized? Or is it the network, with its collaborative character, where knowledge is really shared and amplified? Knowledge has a lot to do with trust, because if someone tells you things in which you have no way to believe, knowledge is not generated. Nowadays, trust in what we know or learn is very diversified. It is not that traditional institutions are in crisis, but that they are specializing in a type of standardization, in giving a certain type of degrees with a certain type of value. It is good that the ways we learn are multiple. The problem is that they end up being closed circuits that ignore and even compete with each other.
And is access to knowledge as universal as it seems? It is indiscriminate. Anyone from anywhere, if they possess the necessary instruments (present in both poor and rich countries), can have access. But, if that does not imply the possibility of establishing some kind of relationship with all that knowledge, it is a worthless door. The paradox is created that it is universal, in the sense of "open to all," but at the same time highly unequal and not at all equitable.
"Sapere aude (Dare to know!)," said Kant. Why is knowing an act of bravery? I believe it has to do with the fact that every act of knowledge, if it truly is one, places us at the limits: the limits of what we can know, of what we know and do not know, of what we can say, of what we can think and not think… Seeing the limits, exposing oneself to what we do not know, implies a risk, but it is also a manifestation of the limits of power: if we see the limits to the set of knowledge that organizes our social, religious, or scientific order, we can question its foundation, its validity, and its tools of domination.
To a certain extent, Kant's phrase sounds as current as when it was written. Haven't we advanced at all since the Enlightenment? Many things have happened. Among them, that the idea of progress through knowledge —through scientific, technological, and artistic development— as a condition for the moral development of humanity has not been validated. I would say that this is the great wound of the 20th century: that caused by a colonial world turned into a global world and destined for this war of some against others in which we continue… All this forces us to question the idea of progress.
How to reverse this situation and make knowledge a true engine of social transformation? If every system of power and knowledge has its cracks or limits, we must learn to discover the limits of ours. A radical enlightened attitude, for me, is to say "we don't believe you"; to ask where the narratives of this announced and reiterated apocalypse in which we seem to be are founded and argued from, and to rise up against them. And it is already being done in many ways. We women are doing it, or populations that do not bow to the parameters of hegemonic coloniality that has always dominated our system of knowledge. And it is also being done from certain horizontal, cooperative, and transparent technological practices. We must lose our fear. The incredulous and combative cry of "we don't believe you" is important.
Text: Patrizia Di Filippo Photography: Mònica Figueras
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