clear enlightenment

In ‘The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge’, Jacques Ranciere defines a poetics of knowledge as follows: ‘A study of the set of procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of science, and signifies this status’ (1994:8). What Ranciere is pointing out here is that scientific (or rational) discourse is not fundamentally different from other literary forms, rather it is a particular set of literary techniques, tropes, gestures, and sets of metaphors that, taken together, produce the sense that what is being articulated has a different status to the articulations of other modes of expression. Ranciere is drawing our attention to the presence within our understanding of knowledge of particular devices which produce that understanding, devices which are most closely associated with poetry but which in actuality shape and steer all of our thinking and our discourse. In the phrase poetics of knowledge it is significant that he uses the term knowledge rather than, for example, knowing. The use of this hard-edged noun indicates an epistemology based on the identification of similarly hard-edged facts; objects of knowledge which might ideally be described as robust, firm, defined, and indeed objective. Covert and unconscious metaphors are mobilised in this understanding such that knowledge becomes understood as a number of more or less hard objects, more or less clearly defined and firmly fixed within the landscape of the imagination. This …

In: Clear Enlightenment | tags: Knowing, Poetics. | #