Articles Reports 2008

Knowledge Flux and the Demand on Thought

Dialogue at Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences

1. Introduction

I must start with thanking the organisers particularly the Director, Prof. Debashish Mukherjee and  Prof. Asoke Chattopadhyay for arranging this dialogue with you. Speaking on knowledge to a set of concerned scientists in this Institute at Kolkata ought to be delightful, though also overbearing. Since all of you have concerns larger than your daily routines, social, human and philosophical concerns for change for the better and for better understanding in general, therefore, I do not need to make any prefatory remarks about locating this dialogue in a bowl of larger concerns.

For less than two decades now the world of knowledge has been experiencing an extra-ordinary flux. The Internet has created a new virtual world of knowledge activity and knowledge management and the place of the university as the undisputed command in the world of knowledge has been challenged and there is atmosphere of a new recognition to the knowledge in society, lokavidya. All this seems strongly related to what is being called the neo-liberal global economy and the beginnings of a situation in which sovereignty of the nation-states is seriously in jeopardy. Mobility, connectivity, modes of employment in the modern sector, the new media and entertainment have all changed life so much that the ideas of politics, resistance, mobilization and culture developed through the previous two centuries are struggling to maintain their relevance. Poverty elimination, brotherhood, equality, liberty, swadeshi, swaraj, non-cooperation, satyagraha, class-struggle and many more concepts of political significance radically concerned with the essential human condition are struggling for a restatement of their meaning in the new contexts. It seems that this task now first relates to the world of knowledge to secure the new meaningfulness to be useful for humanity. Let us therefore first very briefly go over the kind of economic and political changes that are taking place for the last two decades to locate the issue of knowledge in the reality for which its resolution must in turn make sense.

2. The Changing World

It is less than 20 years that the world has moved into a new era. A virtual cyclone has been building up through the marriage of the Internet and the

Neo-Liberal Economy. The new dispensations, information technology, media, entertainment, market, management, higher education and so on are lifting away both knowledge and wealth that people produce in the course of their lives. The peasants, artisans, informal workers and their households again constitute the other side of the divide, this time it is the digital divide. The digital divide is also a knowledge divide of a certain type, knowledge management helping the virtual cyclone lift away everything of significance from across this divide. What is left behind even after being taken away is the knowledge with the people which is their last bastion of strength.

The changes since 1990 resulting from Globalisation, the Internet and the American Wars have taken the world by a storm. Every department of human life has been shaken. The Internet and the Mobile have not only given new and high connectivity but have led to entirely new lifestyles. Industry no more occupies the place of command. In that place now sits Information. Machine is no more the chief expression of capital. Finance and information have moved into its place. They call the shots now. The workers of organised industry have suffered successive defeats. The trade unions are at an all time low. Industry seems to be in a process of being externed from the capitalist social formation. So with the workers. With the rise of capitalism, industry had moved to the center stage and  industrial workers constituted that slot into which large parts of humanity moved to become part of the new society, albeit an oppressed part. Even this is being lost, workers being pushed out into the world across the digital divide to become an informal worker, an artisan. This has the interesting result of pushing all production out side the dominant social formation. This is the Neo-liberal Economy financed by banks and financial agencies and managed by the Information Technologies.

The city of the industrial epoch was the place which housed industry. The Information Age is rebuilding the city as the market place. Large and dominant social sectors of health and education are now in the private domain and constitute integral parts of the market. The market is assuming a new quality and extent everyday. At one end there is a huge corporate sweep to capture the retail market and at the other capital and management reach the farthest and remotest corners to lift revenue from whatever may constitute economic activity there. In the globalized world now there shall be no exchange even in the private domain from which the corporations do not take away their ‘share’, legitimized by the new order, law, politics.

Media, entertainment, games, art, everything has joined the race in the market up-front. The so-called social sphere is also in step. Education, healthcare, water management, rural development, poverty alleviation, everything has queued up to be listed in the stock market. All this is being called the development of knowledge economy. Software giants and their lucrative employment rationalize the new idiom.

The new conflicts in their express forms since, again 1990, the First Gulf War, seem to have inaugurated a new phase of politics and law. There is talk about building of a new empire, at present America leading the show. National parties and people’s institutions like the parliament are becoming less and less important in making of the national policy. Shots are being called by the emerging institutions of the new international order. Nations are no more sovereign the way they used to be in the later part of 20^th century.

The whole thing is going on as if without challenge. Islam and communism still remain the foci around which resistances have built up. But neither seems to be giving a new imagination for a different and just world. The World Social Forum is a secular world wide phenomenon which is generally anti-America and anti-Globalization and which talks about another world being possible. But the participation, the methods and the debates fail to carry conviction. The world is in need of a new politics to move minds across the globe on issues of fundamental human concerns like poverty and autonomy with conviction.

It is our conviction that promise for change towards a better and just world can only be based on mobilization of people’s strength. This strength in the ultimate analysis lies in the knowledge they possess to organize their lives, to understand the world, to resist the oppressor. The changes occurring in the world, the failure of science to deliver and the appearance of the virtual world as the new place of organization of knowledge and the ruling classes, tend to convince us further that lokavidya must be taken on board to solve the challenging problems that the humanity is increasingly facing. It is this argument that this dialogue tries to unfold. We shall for this purpose first talk about the flux in the field of knowledge, then about the disturbance that science is experiencing and about the internet-the new hub of knowledge and finally about lokavidya as a just and promising resource for everybody.

3. Knowledge Flux

Practically every knowledge activity is experiencing big changes in content, method, organization, values, place in knowledge hierarchy, place in society, remunerative potential etc. We can see this happening in education, production, health-care, science, arts, agriculture, media, management etc. These changes as we know are located in the larger changes in life guided by the new global economy, the development of computer and communication technologies and the new wars with the realignment of forces all over the world. Since science has been the center piece of the world of knowledge, a look at what is happening to it should take us to the heart of the matter. Needless to say that an understanding of what is happening to industry, media, arts, or agriculture as knowledge activities is also very important but this would be a very large exercise beyond the scope of this attempt.

An indication of the flux in the world of knowledge may also be seen in the spread of the knowledge terminology. Phrases like knowledge society, knowledge economy, knowledge work, knowledge management, knowledge production, knowledge dialogue, knowledge partnership, knowledge collaboration and so on are being used extensively and also indiscriminately. One cannot enumerate the list because it is a new idiom and these phrases are produced anywhere in the expanding sectors of the economy and activity. Both the concept of knowledge and the politics of knowledge are changing. Knowledge of different peoples has assumed a new movement. Monasteries have become active again and knowledge with the people, lokavidya, is on the path of greater recognition though not yet politically assertive. Even media is claiming to be a place of knowledge activity. A new way of life and thinking, a new imagery of the world is in the making. Received ways of understanding and comprehending changes are failing to serve. With the institutionalization of science and growth of industry in the 19^th century human activity had come to be comprehended by scientific ways through economics, political science, sociology, history and even philosophy. With the destabilization of the place of science in the world of knowledge all this stands shaken. How do we go about reconstituting our understanding in times of such knowledge flux.

4. Science is disturbed

Science now has less money than it had before. It also has less attraction than it had before. Those storming the higher education are more evenly divided into streams of law, management, computer, medicine etc. Engineering colleges still attract very large crowds. In fact, this crowd is growing. But the output of these colleges in a way splits into two. One is like the products of erstwhile polytechnics and the other ready to join the software stream. The science of engineering seems to have taken a beating. Products of the best known engineering colleges go to software and management irrespective of the specialized stream they may come from. It is notable that knowledge activity with high value in the market does not presuppose knowledge of science. Management, software, media are the instances. This response of the state and the market is not unconnected with the position of science now in the world of knowledge. Its place in the position of command, its function on the frontiers of knowledge and its philosophy with strong realist and positivist orientation, have all been disturbed. This wave of disturbance is too large not to be noticed or even not to be a matter of serious concern, not from the vantage point of defense but from the point of view of truth seeking.

   i  Science Loses its Command Over the World of Knowledge

Every human activity is a knowledge activity. Scientific research, production of new knowledge, teaching, design, explanation, comprehension, creative arts, management, writing software, collection, organization and dissemination of information, religion, spiritual enterprise, artisanry, farming, collecting food in forests, hunting, bringing up children, health-care, organizing communities, name any human activity and you will find that it is a knowledge activity. Other than may be those which are performed purely on instruction like in rituals or by a worker on the assembly line, purely mechanically, human activity in general is knowledge activity. The age of science, as we know, weaves a pattern in this world of human activities from a standpoint of knowledge known as the scientific point of view. It had developed wide ranging criteria and methods to allocate any of these activities their ‘rightful’ place in the world of knowledge. These involved the ideas of experiment, testing, verification, reproduction, analytical content, systematic organisation, universal applicability, value-independence etc. This cluster of ideas constituted the general basis for producing a structure in the world of knowledge. Farming, food gathering, local health-care etc. would not be called knowledge activity at all but a simple application of knowledge which may have been handed down through generations. The arts were strictly distinguished from the sciences and placed lower down in the order. Writing for news papers, making films or collecting information for reporting would hardly be considered knowledge activity. Computing would be a service and so would writing programs be. Economics, market or public finance all were tuned to this understanding. Is not all this changing in a big way? Science no more seems to order the world of knowledge.

Science had given a new understanding of nature and produced great riches by providing the basis of new technologies and new industry. However, as it has come to pass, this same technology and industry is destroying nature in unprecedented and irrevocable ways. This shakes science from inside. Can humanity’s best knowledge be destructive towards nature and side with the propertied classes to keep the poor always poor? This adds to the break down of the position science has enjoyed for so long. Philosophically too therefore science ought to cease to occupy the command of the world of knowledge.

ii  New Sciences and the Loosening Grip of Physical Sciences

Certain sections in Euro-American world find information technology, biotechnology, nano-technology and cognitive science at the frontier and see that unstoppable forward movement in them which was once seen in the steam engine. These four taken together have come to be known as converging technologies. Starting around 2003 there has been attempt to build a debate around the leading nature of these technologies in the present day world (Ref. : http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/ and http://www.converging-technologies.org/cyberconference). Unlike science whose prime object was an exact understanding of nature and development of methods of manipulating it, converging technologies program has understanding of human being in material terms and developing methods of manipulating them, their behavior, performance etc. at the center of its concerns. In line with this, the program has major participation of philosophers and social scientists in it. The cyber conference in May 2007 had put out Eight Opening Statements which essentially talked about ‘improvements in the performance of human beings’ through the use of new techniques like ‘prosthetic limbs, silicon chip implants and nanobotic medicine’, which is supposed to ‘redefine the human condition in fundamental ways’. For them “Short of total annihilation of Homo-sapiens, it really does not matter if the converging technologies agenda ends up having substantial negative consequences.” The program is arguing for fundamental changes in science policy such as to free research in these technologies from control of ‘national governments and international agencies’ and says that “the actual pace and direction of research should be left to specialists in the relevant sciences and technologies”.

It cannot be anybody’s case that all these can be done without science or even without science prospering but one could surely argue that it may not require physics, chemistry and even biology to share space in the frontline. The new technologies are likely to demand new types of scientific formulations. And these four themselves are so very different from one another that there is no way to tell at present if at all there is going to be a common epistemic framework which would tie them all together.

iii   Science and Philosophy

Philosophy since the Kantian enterprise had accepted the pre-eminent position of science in the world of knowledge. Slowly science attained an absolute position. Not just philosophy but no social movement could question this for a long time. The feminist and the post-modern movements of America and Europe of the 1970-80s question the absolutist position, they question certain philosophical assumptions and implications. And these can even be seen as precursors to what has been happening to Western thought since the early nineties, though not as causes.

India too has seen an alternative science movement questioning the absoluteness and value independence of science and arguing for the validity of knowledge traditions of different civilizations. Though marginal, this movement led in the 1990s to the organization of three national congresses of traditional sciences and technologies of India. It is this stream which has brought to the fore the idea of lokavidya and the question of rightful place in the world of knowledge for different streams of knowledge present in society. All these, feminism, post-modernism and the lokavidya standpoint, do not accept the downright positivist scientific ontology.

The idea of ontology itself may be undergoing a major change. Science had given birth to realism, as if there was a reality waiting to be discovered through progress in science. The progress in the world of computer and internet and coming into existence of the virtual world has also shaken the scientific ontology. It has no use of ‘realism’ and the activity on it does not favour thinking in terms of things and forces. The world of communications has greater concern with ideas of syntax, meaning, representation etc. If they are asked about what this world consists of, they might even say: human (epistemic) beings who communicate with one another. Philosophical debates born in the wake of scientific advances may soon make way for new debates in a world of different concerns. Philosophy once again needs to recreate itself in relation with the new flux in the world of knowledge.

5. Internet : The new hub of knowledge

New criteria seem to be emerging which now stake their claim to order the world of knowledge. The world of computers and communications, the world of Internet is, as if, saying that there is no use and that there is no great point in reserving knowledge and knowledge activity to the secure places of science, the universities, the research institutions, the laboratories. They seem to be saying that all that is organizable by the new technologies, all that can be processed by a computer, all that can be networked through the new means of communication, deserves to be called knowledge. And the science and art of doing this is called knowledge management. The personal computer, its lightening speed and for all practical purposes unlimited storage, the new connectivity through the Internet and the principles and practice of software  have made possible in the name of knowledge management an entirely new type of activity which is as much knowledge activity as it is an act of management.

1. The Knowledge Terminology

Internet is the new location of human activity. You send letters , chat with friends, partner and collaborate with other agencies, retrieve data and information, do scientific research, strategise experiments, run personal blogs, access the market, design new products, indulge in artistic activity, entertain yourself, carryout educational programs, see films, enter into critical dialogues, create dialoguing groups, form virtual communities, form and run institutions, and do many-many more activities on the internet, the world wide web. Obviously, as you can see, the list is not completable, because, one, it may be too large and diverse and two, it may be essentially not completable, in the same sense in which there can not be made a complete list of human activities. Most of these are referred to as knowledge activity. The software that make all this possible are called knowledge products. We should ask the question why these activities are called knowledge activities now? They were not called knowledge activity when the internet was not there. And now when these activities on the internet are called knowledge activities, when they are performed without the internet also they are called knowledge activities. Same is true with knowledge products. Now that the knowledge product terminology has come into existence through the expanding sector of software, people tend to call many other products in the field of education, health, art, media, science, etc. knowledge packages or knowledge products.

Is the knowledge terminology being increasingly accepted because the software sector and online management have emerged as the most remunerative in the market or there is more to it in terms of meaning and philosophy?   

  ii   Information and Knowledge

The Internet works on the basis of a huge storage of information and a very fast movement of pieces of information from one site to another by the computer and communication technologies. The question that has seriously come-up is whether what is being organized through this new technology is just information or it can qualify as knowledge too as the popularizing terminology suggests? The question of where to use ‘information’ and where to use ‘knowledge’ is an older one. Computers brought to bear new dimensions on this question and after the appearance of the internet its scope further increased because a variety of human activity became possible in and through the new virtual realm.

Often information is considered part of knowledge but there are strong objections to identifying information with knowledge. In the context of the new technology information is mathematically defined, knowledge is not. But in the ordinary usage the term  ‘information’ has much greater scope and one can easily find cases where the use of ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ could justly be interchangeable, and cases where it would be difficult to decide whether to use one or the other more correctly. So there are disagreements and confusions ranging from everyday use to philosophical interpretation. What is most commonly said is that understanding and even points of view are part of knowledge whereas information is neutral to these human qualities. This debate between knowledge and information is rich, it has philosophical content and it has value also in day-to-day work. It is unlikely that the public domain will see a resolution of the issues involved. What is likely to happen is that words and concepts which find wider and wider use would tend to stay and others with their meanings will get marginalized. Similar phenomenon may be said to have happened before when the mechanical science appeared on the scene in Europe around 16^th-17^th centuries.  There were already present in society a variety of knowledge traditions. These knowledge traditions often couched in religious terms had their own values and a relation with human concerns, interests. The new science was value independent and was based on mechanical interpretation of worldly phenomena. So it must not have been easy to accept it as ‘knowledge’ in the then existing context. However, with the passage of time it spread world wide and claimed universal and sovereign status for itself in the world of knowledge.

Internet has created a virtual world where information constitutes the representation of all that can be represented, knowledge included. There is no doubt that such representation of knowledge differs from knowledge itself, for example, values, social interfaces, aesthetic command etc. of any body of knowledge in the real world may not get transferred to the virtual world in which such knowledge may be associated with different values, social interfaces and aesthetic qualities. Even a change of place of such knowledge in the world of knowledge is certainly expected to occur when it reconstitutes itself through informational representation in the virtual world. However as the virtual world grows bigger and bigger, as it becomes richer and richer and more and more activities of consequence from all the fields, economic, cultural, scientific, political etc. start locating themselves on it, the arguments underlining the difference between knowledge and information as we understand them now may tend to become less and less important. In theory the validity of arguments distinguishing knowledge from information may remain as it is but in reality the focus of interest and also the nature of theory building may change so much as to rationalize the shift.

But this is arguing for the ascendant. What happens to that and those on whose backs this new ascendancy is constituting itself ? What happens to art and lokavidya  for example ? And what happens to the artists in the real world and the ordinary life, the great house of lokavidya ? The ascendancy of informational representation and its claim to being knowledge itself has given a new lease of life to popular art and lokavidya but not without a heavy price, namely the distortion they undergo in this process of representation.

iii   Management and Knowledge

The ICTs changed both the quality and the extent of the market and made possible the present global economy. As we know this globalization does not pertain only to economics, which though many may view as being the central phenomenon. Today irrespective of their location in the world, finance, management, knowledge, production, ownership are all related to one another in a manner which was not possible earlier. Previously production and knowledge on the periphery was related to the centers of management, knowledge and finance only through trade and the revenue apparatus of the State( this is leaving out the governance part). Now this relation has developed two new aspects of management and learning-teaching directly. So generally speaking in addition to exchange and revenue two new dimensions of management and knowledge have come into existence across the socio-economic divide. Similar changes seem to have occurred in the relationships of different sectors like media, science, art, entertainment, development, welfare etc. with one another. Knowledge and management are those two aspects which have got added to the existing relationships between various human activities.

The emergence of the management aspect in these relationships ties the world economy very closely and tightly. Autonomy of different activities has reduced considerably making them vulnerable to influences emanating from apparently distant sectors. And these may be very often planned influences. This has therefore pushed up greatly the importance of management in all the activities and departments of human life.

The development of the knowledge aspect in the relationships between different sectors seems to give birth to new legitimacies in the world of knowledge to a great variety of activities. Activities on the media, art works, entertainment, design, agriculture, local health care, handicraft, women’s work at home and with children all now tend to seek recognition as knowledge activities and they seem to have traversed a fair distance on such a road.

The sufferers of the industrial epoch would be right if they say that the excesses of science in the field of knowledge are getting corrected. Art, design, agriculture and craft were always legitimate knowledge activities, the turn of events ought to be very welcome. However the correction of this excess shall remain mainly semantic if other excesses of the period of science and industry are also not corrected.

Whether the reordering of the world of knowledge is based on the recognition that different fields of human activity have it in them to be equals in the realm of knowledge or whether it is because of an expansion in the meaning of knowledge required by the neo-liberal economy or cognitive capitalism as certain sections of the European Left call it? If it is only the latter then in the ultimate analysis the change will only be cosmetic and no actual advantages will accrue to the vast population of the world.

The management and knowledge axes that have emerged with the information technology between the various sectors of human activities have actually not emerged independent of one-another. The two are strongly enmeshed with each other in fact to the extent that knowledge management has taken a new and distinct form. Although the term Knowledge Management first came into existence for management of knowledge within corporations, it is now being used extensively almost everywhere.

iv  Knowledge Management (KM)

It is not that management of knowledge did not take place before. Schools and colleges are popular places where knowledge management means constituting various departments and disciplines of knowledge, imparting knowledge to students, distinguishing between practical and abstract knowledge, learning to connect practical knowledge with processes of production and organising dialogues and conferences for clarity and communication in the abstract arena, etc. Libraries and research institutions are places too of such management of knowledge. Peasant and artisan communities too have their ways of managing their knowledge. Learning from one another about techniques, implements, processes, new discoveries and about raw material, market or policies of the government and training of new generations through communitarian processes involves management of knowledge and information. But knowledge management in the age of computers and communications has a totally different meaning. It is shaping itself as a new kind of knowledge placing itself at the top, for it manages all types of knowledge which includes also the earlier methods of management of knowledge. In this process an extra-ordinary new world, the virtual world, is created which tends to become the new location not just of epistemic power and proceeds to redefine society, humanity, nature. In one word a new world and a new philosophy are born. It is just the beginning so we too can take only a preliminary view of it.

Knowledge management makes possible handling of information on computer in great variety of ways. One can enter information, organise it in desired formats, systematize it in different ways, retrieve it from wherever it is in the virtual domain, dialogue, co-operate, fight or work together with anybody sitting anywhere in the world. It deals with information as written word, visuals and sounds. (I do not know whether touch, taste and smell are also candidates on the list of possibles and whether a virtual community can in any real sense be a replacement for a face-to-face community.) Somebody doing all this need not  himself be a knowledge manager, just as users of telephones need not be communication engineers and drivers of cars are not mechanical engineers..

Today KM is more remunerative than most other knowledge activity, it gives high returns in the market. KM personnel get very high salaries and enterprises where it plays a crucial role earn great profits. It cannot be said that in society and in the world of knowledge it has the highest place as knowledge but it is constantly moving upwards. Our question is, what kind of reordering of the world of knowledge is on the cards. What are the principles, criteria, methods and values that emanate from the virtual world to reorder the world of knowledge? Some straight answers could be the following:—

• All information that is organizable by the ICTs shall be called knowledge.
• Knowledge that is visited more on the Internet is more important, better or higher knowledge.
• Methods of investigation, research that use KM are superior methods compared to those which do not. So also a grading on the vertical scale according to the extent of the use of KM.
• Utilitarian values are the leading lights of the world of knowledge. Market competitiveness provides the quantitative measure of utility.

Not that all this has already happened but this is how it seems it has been happening. It is too large a phenomena and too close to the eyes to see it with high resolution. A huge and epoch making conflict is underway in the world of knowledge for contention for the place of command and therefore on what would hence forward order the world of knowledge.

This shift of command in the knowledge domain from scientificity to the virtual realm tends to break the hierarchies of the old house of knowledge. Arts, management, design and software activity fetch greater value and have high esteem in the public realm than scientific and industrial activity. Knowledge content of these activities therefore, refuses to occupy a lower place in the world of knowledge. But their moving up inevitably changes the concept of knowledge we have become so familiar with through the age of science. Are language and creativity superior knowledge habitats than the scientific experiments and the theories of nature? Are we mistaken in thinking that the world in the ultimate analysis consists of things and forces? Is it a better way to think that the world is created and recreated every moment, incessantly? Is building theories the way science did, after all, a very limited exercise and has run its course of usefulness to humanity? What happens when traditional knowledge, the knowledge of peasants, artisans, women, tribal and small businessmen no more remains one of an inferior variety? What happens if we think that the idea of university as an island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance is incorrect and universities ought to be places of specialized knowledge activity in a world of abundance of knowledge?

6. Lokavidya : A just resource for everybody

i   A Historic Opportunity

However this entire show is being played out within a minority which thinks that the rest of the world, those on the other side of the digital divide, peasants, workers, artisans, women and tribal do not know and even if they do what they do, they are suppliers of sorts and not players. It is our contention that this historic destabilization of the house of knowledge gives a great and historic opportunity to those who love truth, who love nature and who love people, to enter this game of reordering the world of knowledge to shape it in the interest of what they love: truth, nature and people.

ii The Case of Lokavidya

The house of knowledge has been disturbed by one more factor. This is the inclusion of Lokavidya (people’s knowledge, knowledge in society, different knowledge traditions) in the world of legitimate knowledge. The knowledge of the peasant and the artisan is commanding new attention. Their knowledge of production, processes, designs and their skills have started earning recognition again after a gap of several generations. Local health-care, knowledge of natural resources, water management, house building, everything is getting an attention which they did not get for a long time. Through our educational system we have been trained to see ordinary people, those who have not gone to the school, largely as ignorant. We have been trained to see them as doing what they do in the way they do because modern knowledge and facilities have not reached them. But if we make an effort to see ordinary people, peasants, artisans, women, tribal, the ordinary middle class as knowledgeable persons we would realise that with them lies that huge storage and variety of knowledge which may far exceed the total knowledge content produced and accumulated by the universities so far.

Huge populations all over the world have either never gone to the schools or are early drop outs. And even those who continue for a few more years hardly take home any knowledge that they can effectively use. All these people acquire their knowledge in society, in community, in the family, at the worksites through informal training, trial, apprenticeship and so on. They use their knowledge to serve their life needs and in the process serve the larger society. It is this knowledge which is called lokavidya.

iii The Nature of Lokavidya

The nature of lokavidya is totally different from organised knowledge systems, in particular science. Its organisation, values, logic, method, philosophy, everything is different. When, one refers to lokavidya one is not referring to any particular value, method or even logic, philosophy or organisation. As nature and social organisation varies from one place to another and from one time to another, friendship with nature and harmony in society assume different expressions, forms and contents.

So for example, the knowledge, methods and values of peasants in Bengal, Rajasthan, Kenya and Argentina for that matter may be expected to vary greatly from one-another but one can expect that an expert farmer from Bengal will with some experimentation be able to grow rice also in Rajasthan or Africa or even America. He can perhaps do this because his knowledge expressed in very site specific parameters is not local or limited as knowledge. He may have a great knowledge of soil, water conditions, climate, seeds and also the tastes of the people of his area. But when taken to another place with different soil and water conditions, different climate and even different seeds, he may resort to deeper layers of his knowledge of rice cultivation, design experiments and change factors so as to be able produce the result. I do not know of any such experiment conducted. But we know about the extreme change in input conditions and factors that he has braved through at least two centuries now. Also the every voluminous and famous Voelcker Report of late 19^th Century on Agriculture in India concludes by saying that Indian agriculture is optimal every where and as if best suited to the conditions, that there is little that the Indian peasant can be told from outside to improve upon his practice and that if he should improve, it is through inter-regional interaction alone that it is possible (Review of Voelcker Report in PPST Bulletin, 1982, Chennai). And this is about a full century after the introduction of the zamindari system and half a century after the Rothamsted Experiment and the NPK theory of fertility.

I, had an opportunity to investigate the practice of traditional ferrous technology of this country. Agaria, an ‘untouchable’ tribe of central India preserves this tradition to date. They smelt iron ore of relatively low metal content in a small furnace (outer dimensions dia 50 c.m. x height 1 meter) made by local mud mixed with rice husk. It is a vertical shaft cylindrical hole ( dia >15 c.m.) in which ore is charged with locally made charcoal. No slagging material is used and about 3 kilograms of iron bloom is pulled out from the bottom after about 3 hours of firing which requires constant manual pumping of air. The product is beaten to expel mainly air and extraneous matter. This is malleable iron which contains less than 0.3% carbon. As the region changes the furnace and the methods slightly change. In our experiments a master-fireman from Wardruffnagar successfully produced the metal in Varanasi and in Bombay. He had to use different and low grade charcoal and work under different humidity conditions but each time after a couple of experimental runs he could optimize the process to produce the metal. Let us remember that producing the critical temperature for iron smelting at atmospheric pressure is a demanding task. His knowledge, call it science or not, is of a type which can take into account charges in all input conditions to optimize the process for successful smelting. I do not know whether it is possible to do a knowledge engineering task to software all experimental and alternate paths that he may have to suggest with change in input conditions. I think it is unlikely, not because the permutations and combinations would lead to far too large a number but because perhaps the knowledge may not lend itself to discrete classification and may involve continuums and depths of understanding which unravel only on demand.

I would like to take one more example. Dr. Winnin Perriera of Mumbai had conducted a small experiment with the adivasis in the adjacent district of Thane. He said they brought certain plants from the eastern part of India. The adivasis of Thane had not seen these plants before. In two years time they were using this plant for health-care purposes. One can get into the details of the possibilities involved and produce a socio-scientific analysis of how it may have happened. However, let us grant that there is some thing more in such knowledge which delivers on fresh ground which is not all captured by the analytical tools that science provides us with.

These examples can simply be multiplied for thousands of social and geographical segments of the world and for thousands of types of activity that human beings do and are capable of. We are talking about knowledge in society. This is all lokavidya in its great variety. Every combination of a social segment, a geographical segment and an activity may give us a different combination of values, logic and method with fresh philosophical imports. It would be uninteresting to look for such values and methods of lokavidya which are universal in the sense of being applicable in the whole world of lokavidya. But lokavidya is universal in the sense that it is present every where. Where ever there is man/woman there is lokavidya. A slight investigation would show that even the most ‘ignorant’ parasites possess knowledge which has the capacity to do and deliver in every day life. The best of the scientists and professionals also have a large part of their knowledge derived from society or from sources other than the institutional frames in which they work. So, lokavidya is universal in this strong sense too that whether individuals are equipped with any formal organized knowledge or not, they always possess lokavidya of which they make a significant use in daily lives, in building relationships, in designing and strategizing their work and in understanding the world around them.

iv  Logic of Lokavidya

As said above there is no single logic of lokavidya. However, since we are familiar with the logic of science it will add to clarity if we tried to look at some possible general features of understanding, explanation and structure in lokavidya. For example a modern scientific understanding of soil or plants demands knowledge of the chemical constitution of these things and then the observed qualities need to be related to the chemical constitution in a causal way. But a peasant’s understanding is not based on analytical reduction into constituent simple parts but factors like color, seasonal behavior, uses it can be put to etc. are part of it. Now, these factors are external for a scientist. It is not that the peasant’s knowledge is more empirical and less grounded in universal theories but that his understanding is not based on isolating the subject matter from rest of the world. On the contrary things are seen as integral part of a larger world in which relationship with other things, phenomena, human uses etc. is not secondary to something which may be called its intrinsic or essential nature. In line with this, such knowledge is not amenable to a hierarchical structuring, so lokavidya also appears unorganised which it is if organisation of knowledge can be done only on a deductive model, the way science is organised. If we want to use a modern term we can say that lokavidya follows network logic of organisation, nothing is above or below and there is no beginning or end even in principle. Knowledge of agriculture, water management, forestry, architecture, health-care, industrial activity and everything else should all be related with one-another, anyone of these drawing understanding from many other areas without looking up or down to it. Lokavidya traditions are very large traditions of knowledge encompassing gradually all that there is while granting great autonomy to every aspect of it. The oft resorted practice of providing rational scientific explanation to peasant’s knowledge or to an adivasi’s understanding or to a metal worker’s method or even to the use of local plants in health care practices is an exercise which turns the epistemic humanity upside down, explains the live in terms of the dead.

v The Dynamics of Lokavidya

Unfortunately even those who recognise the great fact of lokavidya see it as leftovers of the traditional knowledge or just as traditional knowledge which is drying up by the day. This understanding is alien to lokavidya. Man’s epistemic capacities may withdraw, may become dormant because of oppressive external conditions, but to think that it is in some sense becoming leaner or drying up in some absolute sense is to be completely in error. It is in the nature of man to think, to innovate, to improve upon, to create according to his genius and according to the needs. In this process he seems to use both his theoretical understanding and his experiences. Lokavidya is born with man and conversely. In lokavidya theory and practice merge, knowledge and life become one. Changes in life style, technology and ways of thinking are routinely assimilated in lokavidya. The greatest fact about lokavidya is that it resides in the loka, among the people.

Organised knowledge, its systems and methods come into existence in different times, their importance waning with the change of times. Whether it is Yoga Samhita or Nyaya Vaisheshika or whether it is Navya Nyaya or modern logic, they are all subjected to such change. Science is not going to be an exception. All knowledge starts from lokavidya and must return to lokavidya. Aspects of organised knowledge that do not return to lokavidya lose all reference to humanity and turn asuri, where after they have no option but to perish. If science insists on the atomic bomb and if it insists on violating nature then its days have to be numbered. The world of knowledge needs to be reordered according to the values of lokavidya. But this demands transformation also into a society where there is no exploitation of man by man.

The Internet with its ever expanding virtual world gives an impression of according social dignity to what it calls traditional knowledge. Traditional knowledge may have more entries on the Internet than any other type of knowledge. The knowledge managers have set their eyes on the knowledge outside the university, with communities, with individuals, on informal knowledge. Media, entertainment, drug industry, food industry, the world of design, art products all are in it in a big way. The word is being spread that the new world recognizes knowledge with the people. It is not lokavidya that they are interested in, they only want pieces of knowledge which can be worked further to fit into their economic schemes. People’s values, way of thinking, method of work, social accountabilities, nothing interests them. So whereas, the university had refused to recognize that there is knowledge at all with the people, the virtual world recognizes that there is knowledge with the people but brings it into the public domain in a completely truncated form.

These processes have just begun, they are not in any accomplished state. The fact that traditional knowledge has become a matter of public debate in a world when the house of knowledge is without a clear command is a condition of great significance. Lokavidya must find ways to assert and claim the place of command in the new dispensation.

7. Bauddhik Satyagraha

Let us look back in very brief and try to construct an arrow for the future. We first noticed the sweeping changes occurring in the world since the beginnings of Globalization, the Internet and the first Gulf War (1990) and in this context discussed the flux in the field of knowledge, the breaking of the received order in the world of knowledge. Our discussion covered the disturbance that science was experiencing, the emergence of the converging technologies, the rise of knowledge management from the virtual domain to increasingly claim the place of command in the world of knowledge and lokavidya the perennial source of strength of the people which ought to be seeing a historic opportunity to make a bid for a proper place for itself in the world of knowledge. Converging technologies embed knowledge in the technological endeavour. Knowledge management from the virtual domain weds knowledge to management. Science is unable to rise above its institutional framework. Lokavidya embedded as it is in practice finds the theoretical challenges from organized knowledge somewhat tall to handle. Knowledge that has been produced cannot be eliminated by corporate maneuver or by government decision or by decision in professional bodies however large and powerful they be. The need of the times is a knowledge movement that apportions just and rightful place to all streams of knowledge in society, a knowledge movement that reorders the world of knowledge and erects afresh the society-knowledge interface which has been so badly bruised and disfigured by the ever pushing economic powers and economic criteria. Will the dissenters of the university, social activists, political activists, constructive workers and all those working for emancipation of knowledge in their own ways like those engaged in struggles against the patents regime and activists from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement make a common cause to build such a knowledge movement? Should this knowledge movement take the form of a knowledge satyagraha  whose basic set of values could be :

1. No method of production or management of knowledge to be accepted as superior to others. The world of knowledge ought to be free of hierarchies.
2. To oppose privatization of knowledge.
3. To oppose restrictions on peasants and artisans in the use of their knowledge for their life purposes.
4. To give lokavidya the respect that any proper knowledge deserves irrespective of its market value under the present circumstances.
5. To support struggles aimed at improvement of the economic value of lokavidya.
6. To understand and oppose the expropriation of lokavidya by the corporations. Let us remember that all ex-situ storage and preservation of natural processes endangers its in-situ existence.
7. To recognize and underline the limitations of the virtual domain as a location of knowledge activity.
8. To oppose the false propaganda about the potential and capacities of the new technologies.
9. Knowledge that destroys nature be refused the status of legitimate knowledge.
10. Knowledge that creates a supra-natural realm be it through religion or through a virtual dispensation, be refused the status of legitimate knowledge.

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