Abstracting knowledge formation: a report on academia and publishing.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Warburg, James Paul
• Date: 22 March 2002

Considered across the long reach of history, it is evident that the dominant formation of knowledge is becoming more abstract. More recently, this process has been super-charged by a changing culture of inquiry that puts a hyper-intensified emphasis on rational codified investigation with commodifiable outcomes. This is to argue that the dominant processes that frame knowledge formation are fundamentally changing, not that all the content of knowledge is necessarily becoming more abstracted or distanced from the object of inquiry. The key distinction here, for the purpose of our argument, is between form and content. To put it as precisely as is possible at this early stage in the exposition, the dominant form of knowledge production is becoming more abstract, even if the dominant content of knowledge follows a strangely contradictory path of an abstract obsession with technical application to 'concrete' outcomes. Content moves between an emphasis on 'innovative' knowledge that breaks with once taken-for-granted understandings (an outcome of the abstraction process) and an obsession with the application of that knowledge as a technical, practical and commodifiable act (what might be called a 're-concretization of pure research'). For example, the difference between the traditional-modern cataloguing of nature in Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) and the late-modern mapping of the human genome provides an extraordinary but complicated comparison of different levels of abstraction. In one sense, they are both abstract taxonomies of nature, siblings in common purpose across the centuries attempting to organize our understanding of the relationship between things. Old Doctor Linnaeus is still with us as we survey the animal and plant kingdoms. However, in another sense, the historical shift from the dominance of the first taxonomy, based on details of what things look like, to the second, based on theories of the constitutive foundations of biological life, symbolizes an incredible change in the cultural frame. This difference is graphically signified by the gradual disappearance of the dominant metaphor of knowledge in Linnaeus's time--the now archaically concrete metaphor of the 'tree of knowledge'.

Stark evidence that the nature of knowledge was changing across the course of the late-twentieth century was provided by the publication of two very different books. The first, by the American liberal-conservative and Harvard academic Daniel Bell, was called The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1976). It went into numerous reprints and, for at least a decade after its publication, became one of the most influential books in the social sciences. The cover of the Peregrine edition signalled the thesis of the book. It depicted an industrial green-painted brick wall carrying the graffiti 'Knowledge Rules, OK'. Playing off the contemporary phrase 'The Economy Rules, OK', the graffitied words suggested the continuing importance of the market in knowledge production, but it made the more startlingly original claim that the very nature of the market, indeed of social life in general, was being remade by codified knowledge itself. Knowledge was not only being increasingly commodified in an expanding market, it was becoming the axial principle of all market relations. Interestingly for our purposes, in his preface Bell saves his most fulsome note of gratitude for the non-university institution, the Russell Sage Foundation. (1)

The author of the second path-breaking book of that same decade offers a very similar gesture. In his preface he writes with portentous self-effacement: 'Such as it is, I dedicate this report to the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie of the Universite de Paris VIII (Vincennes)--at this very postmodern moment that finds the University nearing what may be its end, while the Institute may just be beginning'. The author of these words is the French radical Jean-Francois Lyotard, and his book is The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1986). (2) Again, an academic writes under the profound influence of a non-university institution: this time the book was commissioned by the government of Quebec through the Conseil de Universities. It is telling that the sixty-seven page exploratory essay that so casually wrote off one of the original mediaeval universities as nearing its end went on to become one of the defining scholarly books of our time. In the excitement about its pronouncements on a new age of scepticism towards old truths and grand narratives, most readers overlooked the substance of its subtitle--'A Report on Knowledge'. Just as Bell's interest in the changing nature of knowledge was translated into a related interest of his (namely, the coming post-industrial information society), Lyotard's focus on knowledge was also read in terms of his broader claim: in his case, a general treatise on the coming of the condition of the postmodern.

The publication of these two books provides a point of departure for a consideration in this essay of knowledge formation in contemporary Australia. In the first place, they are relevant because while both books were very influential here they did not signal an outpouring of local academic research into the area of knowledge formation. Secondly, they need to be addressed because the books popularized analytical approaches that are both partial and politically partisan. Against Bell, we will be arguing that 'post-industrial society' does not reinstate the norm of free inquiry nor bring with it an ethic of communality. Against Lyotard's emphasis on language games we will be arguing that the change is structured and systematic. Dubiously, both Bell and Lyotard--the liberal and the postmodernist--considered the change to be an exciting break with the modern, ushering in a world of free movement and post-ideological openness. In Australia, where the concept of 'knowledge' is now attached to every report on education and training or research and development, mainstream writings still carry the rhetoric of open inquiry and everywhere it is chained to the future of the market.

A politically critical consideration of the structures and transformations of knowledge production is yet to be conducted. Even in the seemingly more manageable sub-field of publishing-and more specifically scholarly publishing--the subject remains thoroughly under-examined except in terms of technical issues. The focus of analytic work has been pointed to elsewhere. Recent decades have witnessed the rapid expansion of academic fields and methodologies committed to examining the interrelationship of material practice, economic conditions and textuality, especially within cultural studies, sociology of the media, and literary theory. However, such developments have not translated into analytical work on publishing itself. When the publishing industry is written about directly, it is usually approached within a fairly narrow set of concerns. Most existing accounts in Australia describe issues of foreign ownership, British cultural imperialism and import protection. (3) Michael Wilding is the exception in asking some broader questions about the qualitative impact of mergers and takeovers upon Australian literary publishing. (4) Meanwhile, ironically, postgraduate fee-paying vocational courses on the practices of publishing have flourished, and much technical and instrumental material is written in this context about information management strategies and new library technologies.

In order to redress the lacunae in both theoretical and empirical work, this essay works at two levels, attempting to integrate understandings about the changing nature of knowledge with an understanding of the material conditions of its production and dissemination. At the more abstract analytical level, it provides an overview of major trends in knowledge formation, arguing that we are witnessing the emergence of a new dominant mode of inquiry. Closer to the ground, it surveys some of the institutional and technological conditions that are reshaping the mechanisms, practice and content of contemporary Australian scholarly publishing. Bringing together these analytical levels is intended to contribute to a growing recognition that, as the nature of knowledge production is changing in Australia and worldwide, new forms of analysis and engagement are required to respond to these shifts. Even the term 'knowledge production' used here is used advisedly: it is not intended to imply an agreement with the usual analogy drawn between the supposed transition from 'industrial' to 'post-industrial' society and a movement from things to ideas. Ideas, as part of constitutively different regimes of knowledge, have always been with us; our argument is that the dominant way in which knowledge is framed and disseminated is now as abstract information capital. The process of abstraction that we are describing here is one that dwells in the very material and practical processes of scientific and social inquiry and management. It is embedded in the practices of institutions such as universities, libraries and publishing houses. And, to use Geoff Sharp's concept, it is carried by an emergent class of intellectually trained persons. This category of persons, what other writers have variously called 'the professional and technical class' (Bell), 'the knowledge workers' (Kumar) and 'the technocracy' (Touraine), are in Sharp's terms trained in the techniques of what might be called analytical inquiry (see his essay in the present volume).

Trends in Knowledge Formation

This essay will soon narrow its focus. However, in order to understand what is happening to academic publishing, both in Australia and globally, it is necessary first to provide a general overview of the dominant trends in knowledge production across the turn of the twentieth century. Five key trends can be identified in the contemporary production of scholarly...