Populations of Misre/Cognition

When Jacques Lacan coined the term "méconnaisance" or "misrecognition," he was referring to the way in which a maturing subject comes to understand his or her encounter with his or her own reflection in the mirror—a psycho-developmental period also known as The Mirror Stage; this encounter, as Lacan ([1949] 2009) theorized, leads to the emergence of an idealized projection of who the subject is. This "Ideal I" that emerges from this encounter with the virtual Other, that is nonetheless the Self, produces both a recognition and a misrecognition of this "I".

On the one hand, it produces a recognition of the Self as a coherent body in which this "I" is located. On the other hand, it takes us to a misrecognition of the Self through this virtual image that both hides aspects of the subject—and, thus, misleads the subject in his or her own self-understanding—and also reveals how we are read by others, how we are seen by them. This last point is especially important because it highlights how any representation necessarily abstracts away some elements or qualities, gives salience to others, and forecloses alternative images that might lead to different patterns of behavior and self-understanding.

What I contend in this brief commentary is that the previous reflection is of the utmost importance if we aim to take the concept of "Populations of Cognition" to its full potential. This is so because this notion needs to be dialecticized, i.e., it needs to be read both in its positivity—a population that actually exists and that is known/able, and how this population exists and can be known—and, also, in relation to its negation—a population that is misrecognized in the Lacanian sense. Again, this last possibility emerges from the foreclosure that any representation, in its inability to apprehend the whole of a phenomenon, implies.

Be this as it may, at this point it is necessary to distinguish between several epistemological positions that can be mapped in these exercises of recognizing and misrecognizing. There is, first, the position of the subject that bio-psycho-social sciences study; self-understanding, of course, as psychoanalysis shows, implies both of these processes but is of no interest to our present commentary. Then, there are the scientists that social studies of science (STS) seek to comprehend; here, cognition and misrecognition become fundamental categories for understanding how the sciences both produce knowledge and ignorance (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008), objective accounts and subjective modes of experiencing the world, hegemonic discourses and subalternities, and, in general, ways of knowing in which global knowledges coexist with a radical perspectivism that nonetheless represents the biggest challenge to a notion of objectivity as a view from nowhere. Clearly, the field of STS, in its dialogue with postcolonial, feminist, and critical race studies, needs to be fully aware of how the sciences dialectically produce knowledge whose partiality and situatedness might foreclose not only different perspectives but also ways of being-in-the-world that have existed or could exist.

And, finally, the STS scholar also faces these dialectical processes of knowing and misrepresenting; here, the awareness of this productive tension serves as an ideal that constantly confronts us with the imperative to revisit our narratives in order to explore new accounts that might lead to new questions, aims or, even, more democratic cognitive practices.

In any case, save for the first level, the dialectic between recognizing and misrecognizing is useful to grasp relationships between knowing subjects that study other knowing subjects that, therefore, are taken as objects of knowledge. Programmatically, I propose that this dialectic reading of misre/cognition could be explored by paying attention to the following six elements that, in some way or another, appear in the six empirical papers composing this special issue. In what follows I will elaborate what I mean.

1. Populations of Cognition and Territories/Borders

Populations of Cognition are defined, at least partially, in terms of the territories they occupy or have historically occupied, but, as Arjun Appadurai ([1990] 2011) has argued, there are also de-territorialized populations in which place has become only...