Introduction: Situating Knowledge

LINDA HUTCHEON Introduction: Situating Knowledge When Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard entitled his 'report on knowledge' for the Quebec government in the 1970s the 'postmodem condition,' he gave a (much contested) label to something important that was happening in our familiar European-based culture's concept of what constitutes knowledge.1 Whether our own view of this and the rhetoric in which we might choose to talk about it suggest crisis or opportunity may be a question of temperament, but most of us have to face daily the consequences of the Age of Information Technology. For educators, this means that we can no longer assume that training within a discipline is simply a rnatter of the acquisition of something unproblernatically called 'knowledge.' In a time of information overload, as Lyotard pointed out, the question of 'who will know?,2 cannot be separated from the brute fact that it is efficiency of information transmission that will likely legislate available knowledge. Some commentators have seen universities as failing in their traditional role here and point to the proliferation of commercial information storage and retrieval systems as proof that institutions of higher education are no longer 'the privileged site of research and the sale repository of "advanced" knowledge.') Given such a challenge, we invited a number of researchers who work within a university context to address the larger underlying question of what 'knowledge' has come to mean in their very different disciplines. The frame of reference was that implied by the title of this volume. 'Discovery ' suggests some empirical faith that knowledge is out there waiting for the discoverer; 'invention,' on the contrary, foregrounds the formative input of the inventor in what constitutes knowledge. 'Knowledge' is the word we use for both a process and a product, but each affects our ways of thinking and feeling as well as our structures of meaning and value. In European-based intellectual traditions, it used to be common to distinguish between knowledge and understanding. Now, as these essays show,one is more likely to speak of the social, historicat and political 'construction' of knowledge. Are these different conversations? Have the discussions about knowing changed character over the years, or have they merely changed clothes? We also asked our contributors to think about whether the knowledge that science offers is different in kind - or degree UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61. NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1992 416 LINDA HUTCHEON - from that a.vailable through the arts. And~ provoked by feminist theory and the example of non-European-based cultures, we asked that they consider the relation of experiential or practical ways of knowing to what we call ~knowledge' within our academic disciplines. The essays collected here do indeed address these and other issues, tackling head-on the forms and modalities of knowledge and both their institutionalization and their participation in the processes of cultural legitimation and authority. Refusing epistemological despair, they each suggest that current 'postmodern' challenges to humanistic and positivistic notions of knowledge might be liberatory (and not only threatening) when read in historical as wen as critical ways. The democratization of education and the new plurality of perspectives operating within the academy (as well as in our culture at large) have meant new constituencies ~ new voices demanding to be heard. As feminist musicologist Susan McClary points out: Discovering that social reality has been humanly organized through binary oppositions can call forth widely different reactions: for those who have benefitted from the illusion that culture and knowledge were grounded in truth (rather than social ideology and privilege), postmodern deconstruction is a calamity. But for those who have been kept in their places by those reigning oppositions, deconstruction can be cause for celebration.4 'Deconstruction' is one of a series of new buzz-words heard in discus": sions of knowledge today. Instead of talking about Kantian noumena or phenomena or even about the materialist or empiricist versus the idealist, the discourse today, as these essays show, is often structured around terms such as provisionality and 'situatedness.' Instead of discussing knowledge in terms of depth models (and thus as beyond, behind, or beneath) or as universalist and value-free, these essays tend to question the social and ideological norms that...