Landscape and Power in Geographical Space as a Social-Aesthetic Construct by Olaf Kühne

Author:Olaf Kühne
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.3.2.3 On the Changing Relation Between Science and Politics

Although the power of the individual state to “maintain established structures and control of relations between opposed societal interests” (Belina 2006, p. 13) may be receding—among other things as a result of globalization—it still has many channels through which to exercise its authority. The state, for Foucault, can be described as “a superstructure reaching across a whole series of power networks including the body, sexuality, the family, forms of behavior, knowledge, technology etc.” Nevertheless, it can only exercise this “superordinate function” (Foucault 1978, p. 116) because it is itself rooted in a series of multi-faceted and undefined power relations that “constitute the indispensable foundation for these major forms of negative power” (ibid.). Among these are the relations between politics and science. Interest will focus in the following section on the mechanisms within the general context of landscape with which the state maintains its power and that of its servants, along with the “micro-powers” (Foucault 1977, p. 39) of its external intellectual resources.

The political system has recourse both internally and externally to scientific research; not only the relations between science and politics, however, but the system of science itself has fundamentally changed. The separation of fundamental from applied research (‘mode 1’ knowledge production) has given way to systematically mixed forms of applied fundamental research (‘mode 2’ knowledge production; see Gibbons et al. 1994; Latour 1999; Nowotny et al. 2001; Bender 2004; Nowotny 2005; Berr 2013). This modal shift foregrounds the “ad hoc, context-driven nature” (Berr 2013, p. 130) of many modern research projects. Latour, in fact, distinguishes ‘science’ from ‘research’: “While Science had certainty, coldness, aloofness, objectivity, distance, and necessity, Research appears to have all the opposite characteristics: it is uncertain; open-ended; immersed in many lowly problems of money, instruments, and know-how; unable to differentiate as yet between hot and cold, subjective and objective, human and nonhuman” (Latour 1999, p. 20)

According to Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny (1995), the transition from mode 1 to mode 2 entails an epistemological break: science no longer investigates the basic laws of nature, but produces ‘socially robust knowledge’ in applied interdisciplinary contexts (see Kukla 2000; Viehöver 2005). This also bears on the relation between science and non-science: science is seen as a node within a real-world-focused feedback system of autonomies, alliances, and public presences (Latour 1999):The real-world focus implies the incorporation into the scientific of a range of instruments from technical appliances, through surveys and data collection, to expeditions (and the various sites associated with these activities and objects), in which information about the ‘non-scientific’ world is gathered.

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