Who Knows? Sovereign and Relational Selves

Mainstream WKs rely upon the figure of a discrete and self-sufficient knowing subject, a figure in command of her or his self in the pursuit of knowledge, as the locus of knowing. This self-conception of the individual knower as an autonomous centre of coherent thought and action resonates with dominant Western understandings of selfhood — of a ‘sovereign’ self — and accompanying ideologies about the possibilities of individual achievement and agency in the world (Geertz, Reference Geertz, Rabinow and Sullivan1979, p. 229; Taylor, Reference Taylor1992). In universities and other mainstream knowledge institutions, the official story tells us that this figure achieves distance from his/her subject matter through the scientific method, the rigorous application of reason, critical scrutiny or other institutionally licensed method. As feminism, poststructuralism and the sociology of knowledge have shown, distance and method promise neutrality and objectivity of a transcendent variety following the displacement of God and the transfer of some of his powers to man through the Enlightenment. The coalescence of knower and method with institutional authority fuels a popular and powerful story about WKs. Taken together, these elements resonate through Western selves, populations and institutions to disseminate and authorise WKs to adjudicate on the known world.

The story of the knowing self, though, is a far more complicated affair. The idea of a wholly sovereign self is a thinly-disguised fiction and the accompanying knowledge practices are an elaborate set of tricks which researchers and knowers play on themselves and others. Knowledge is always and necessarily emplaced and relational, emerging through assemblages of non-human and human elements (from laboratory equipment and research teams to computer software and individuals) and institutional arrangements (from local level hiring decisions about fellowships to national research funding priorities). Throughout the conception, execution and dissemination of research, individual researchers rely upon others to formulate questions, pursue inquiry and verify and circulate knowledge. These manifold exchanges evince a relationally constituted researcher rather than an autonomous and preexisting sovereign knower.

The fiction of the wholly sovereign knower can be apprehended by considering the central and apparently autonomous activity of writing. Writing is at once an unusual and powerful practice in the predominantly oral scheme of human history (Ong, Reference Ong1982, p. 7). The scriptural economy, as Michel de Certeau notes, consists of constructing ‘a text that has power over the exteriority from which it has first been isolated’ (de Certeau, Reference de Certeau1984, p. 1345). This has important implications for the constitution and standing of the knowing subject, and the relationships thereby established with the world and other humans. The blank space of the page ‘delimits a place of production for the subject’ (1984, p. 1345) and represents the possibility of the conventional knowing subject of science. It is also central to a concrete practice that generates this subject: It is a space in which the self comes into being as knowing subject. Facing the blank page places the knower in ‘the position of having to manage a space that is his own and distinct from all others and in which he can exercise his own will’ (1984, p. 1345). A certain type of isolation is central to this practice, with writing involving ‘the withdrawal and the distance of a subject in relation to an area of activities’ (1984, p. 1345).

However, despite the privilege of writing and the power that it exerts in bringing the sovereign knower into being, another picture emerges if we consider writing at its limits. One limit emerges with the event, experienced by most writers, of losing a text or manuscript whether through accident or, as most commonly happens today, some sort of computer or software glitch. This experience — mine was the result of a power failure — is frequently accompanied by the bemused and frustrated observation that it seems impossible to recreate what was previously written. Yet this bypasses the fact that agency does not rest solely with the author. The power failure testifies to the agency of the world, to the processes and forces at play in writing, from the keyboard to computer processing to the desk and to lighting. Furthermore, authorship is unlikely to be consistent and sustained through time because it seems unlikely that the multifaceted physiology and psychology constituting the I comes together in the same way hour after hour, day after day. Overall, to attempt to sustain (to recreate) the sovereign writing subject after a power failure or similar event (to demand, ‘What was I writing?’) is to ignore and attempt to efface the fact that a piece of writing is a contingently formed assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987, p. 3).

Writing, then, is a key practice within WKs that posits and brings the scholar into being, but it does so through a partial fiction that casts the knower as something which he or she is not; as an autonomous being wholly in command of the practice of writing. As the misfortune of losing and not being able to recreate text while writing reveals, the knower and writer is constituted through, and therefore also undone by, writing practice — a practice that takes in a multitude of elements beyond the individual scholar. The perplexity and annoyance that many writers experience in this situation speaks to a tension between, on the one hand, a particular conception of self borne of culturally and historically specific epistemological designs and, on the other hand, the inherent contingencies and relational nature of the practice of writing.

The experience of losing text may mean that it is appropriate, against the power accorded to writing in scholarship, to note its similarities with speaking as a practice ‘tied to the movement of life itself in the flow of time’ (Ong, Reference Ong1977, pp. 20–12). In this alternative view, writing and hence the knowing self that arises with it, are events in and of the world. The contingencies of the practice of writing serve to disrupt the fiction of a sovereign knower by highlighting that the writer is less autonomous and more relational than tends to be presumed in WKs.

The fact that Western knowers are more relational — and hence less atomistic and reductionist — than is commonly recognised in official and popular accounts of WK production may hold potential to open to others and the world, including for connection with other peoples and knowledge traditions. However, official and popular accounts of what it is means to know in WKs are also bound up with a complex and challenging cultural politics of knowledge production that need to be engaged to make progress in engaging IK within the academy. As noted previously, non-WKs are routinely trumped by WK in serious matters of politics or science. IKs may be incorporated within mainstream knowledge settings to address political demands for cultural recognition and to ameliorate colonial wrongs, but while WKs remains ascendant and totalise the field of possible knowledge there remains little prospect for seriously engaging with IKs. The figure of the sovereign knower is central to this politics for it is his/her sovereign character that gives access to the transcendent and the opportunity to survey the world and others from a distance. How, then, does this situation come about and what are the prospects for breaking with the dominance of the sovereign knower in order to seriously engage IK?

The Cultural Politics of the Sovereign Knower

The sovereign knower engages in epistemological violence vis-à-vis cultural others to the extent that he/she bypasses other traditions and returns to his/her self and knowledge systems in the production of knowledge. This process, which disavows other knowledges and forecloses upon possibilities for entering into serious exchange and engagement with them, is facilitated by an understanding of reason as transcendental, a stance which empowers the knowing subject vis-à-vis the world and others. To find a path beyond the sovereign knower requires understanding and engaging with some of the history and cultural politics of the knower as sovereign. While there are many possible paths to take in pursuit of such an analysis, Charles Taylor is a useful anchor because he considers the self in WKs alongside the pursuit of the morally just and good, concerns that are central to contemporary efforts to engage IKs.

Taylor (Reference Taylor1992) acknowledges the cultural and historical specificity of Western selfhood, yet at the same time seeks to make universalising moral claims, a move that speaks directly to the problem of bypassing other traditions. The very possibility of making universal moral claims through the knowing subject within the Western tradition turns on the way the subject oscillates between soulful or interior depth and godlike transcendence. The self can be a locus of goodness because it is a coherent soul or entity, and it can access and reference the wider world though quasi-transcendental reason. For Taylor, the external constitutive good that was previously provided to selves in the Western tradition by submission to God may no longer be as available or accessible as it was in centuries past, but ‘something still functions analogously’ at the site of the modern subject through notions such as altruism, freedom and justice (1992, p. 95). ‘[R]ational agency stands infinitely above the rest of the universe, because it alone has dignity, brings with it an awe which empowers us morally’ (1992, p. 94).

The problem with Taylor's appeal to transcendentalism lies in the way it bypasses and surpasses others from a particular vantage point. By centring Western constitutive goods and transcendental reason, Taylor follows a broader pattern in the social sciences of returning to the familiar, the self, and to the Western tradition. Foregrounding the sovereign knowing self makes Western scholarship the ground and field for man's [sic] self-representation (Cavarero, Reference Cavarero2000, p. 49) rather than a site that encourages mutually dialogic encounters with others. One of the key ways in which this occurs is through the elementary move of attributing to the self the capacity of questioning, particularly in the mode of asking what. This move simultaneously circumscribes the world and empowers the sovereign self. Various philosophies of the Western tradition, for instance, give the sovereign self the capacity ‘of questioning itself, or asking itself questions, in such a way as to appropriate the alterity or obscurity that troubles it’ (Agacinski, Reference Agacinski, Connor, Nancy and Cadava1991, p. 9, emphasis in original). As Emmanuel Levinas puts it, the transcendental light of reason ‘renders us master of the exterior world but is incapable of discovering a peer for us there’ (1987, p. 65).

In slightly different terms, the question what? ‘is put by him who looks’ and therefore ‘the “what?” is already wholly enveloped with being, has eyes only for being’ (Levinas, Reference Levinas1991, p. 23, emphasis in original). In turning back upon itself, the asking what by the knowing subject bypasses the distance through which he/she simultaneously gains purchase and power over the outside and brings him/herself into being. In this mode of inquiry, the knowing subject discovers itself and the ground of its being while ordering the world on its terms. By centring the sovereign knowing subject, WKs have partially created an echo chamber of being that leads Western scholarship back to itself. In efforts to understand the socio-political orders of other peoples, for instance, scholarship discovers kings, courts and moots — whatever is necessary ‘to explain indigenous culture in heuristic Western terms’ (Wagner, Reference Wagner1986, p. xi). In essence, we ask ‘How do these people solve our problems within their means’ rather than ‘How do they resolve and transform our meanings within their problems’ (1986, p. xii). The risk, of course, is that scholarship becomes a ‘moral allegory of what we consider to be “culture” or “society”’ (1986, p. xiv, emphasis in original).

The self-referentially of being in Western scholarship does not, of course, totalise the whole, and has also been the focus of critique. A recent challenge comes from Quentin, Meillassoux (with Brassier & Badiou) (Reference Meillassoux, Brassier and Badiou2008) who coins the term correlationalism to describe the ways in which, from Immanuel Kant onward, Western scholarship tends to take being as the ground and possibility of knowledge, constantly seeking verification of knowledge through thought, rather than accepting the possibility of a precritical outside to thought. In the process, Meillassoux argues, we have lost access to ‘the great outdoors [. . .]: that outside which was not relative to us, [. . .] existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory’ (2008, p. 7). A similar move is necessary to adequately engage IK in the academy; a need to accept an Indigenous outside that exists prior to the colonial relation and that cannot be totalised by Western scholarship (Bell, Reference Bell2014). To acknowledge both an Indigenous outside and the temporal priority of Indigenous difference is to put into question the persistent fiction of the sovereign knower.

In short, the deployment of transcendentalism through the figure of the sovereign knower within WKs bypasses and surpasses others from its own vantage point. This forecloses upon the possibilities of serious engagement and exchange with cultural others and their knowledge systems. WKs have created an echo chamber of being that leads Western scholarship back to itself, sustaining the powerful fiction of the figure of the sovereign knower. Nonetheless, as foreshadowed in the first section, the necessarily relational character of the knower and knowledge production may open knowers to other traditions, thereby offering some possibilities for undoing the sovereign self and a genuine engagement with IK in the academy. Because scholarly being is of the world, operating as a shifting assemblage of elements, the knower is also necessarily the site of possible connections among perspectives, cultures, materials, forces and so on that hold potential for unravelling colonial knowledge relations and engaging across difference. The next section takes up these possibilities by revisiting the practice of writing.

From the Sovereign Knower to Relational Possibilities

The first section of this article highlighted, against popular and official understandings of knowledge production in the Western tradition, that the knower is less autonomous and more relational than tends to be presumed. Rather than being wholly in command of oneself and the forces and conditions of knowledge production, knowers are bound with and constituted by a complex web of entanglements. This line of argumentation is partially borne of a rethinking of subjectivity in WKs that has gathered pace over the course of the 20th century, culminating with feminist and poststructuralist theorising in recent decades (for two overviews, see Dallmayr, Reference Dallmayr1981, pp. 21–37; Henry, Reference Henry, Connor, Nancy and Cadava1991). A key contention of this scholarship is that the self is more appropriately considered an assemblage interpolated and produced by discourse or formed in relations rather than figured as an intrinsic being. Despite this argumentation, the concrete and specific implications of the critique of the sovereign subject for the practice of authorial subjectivity remain relatively unexplored in mainstream scholarship. In this final section, I want to revisit the practice of writing to explore the possibilities that knowers might connect with cultural others and IKs, rather than returning to one's self and to WKs, by pursuing relational ways of knowing and being.

At some stage in their careers, most scholars receive advice to seek a voice — their voice — in which to write. The additional counsel to imagine and write for an audience brings into play common sense and yet paradoxical assumptions of WKs, including that the voice of the author is singular while the audience is multiple. The adoption of this advice renders the scholar simultaneously present to him/herself and makes the world his/her stage. Yet already it is necessary to examine the work and accompanying epistemological violence that is done by thinking of authorship in this way. De Certeau notes that writing introduces a separation by dividing ‘the traditional cosmos in which the subject remained possessed by voices of the world’ (1984, p. 134). Writing on the blank page cuts the knower off from others and shakes one free of them.

Writing as a sovereign knower also separates knowers from the accompanying interactions that require taking concrete others into account. Writing invokes vision in place of orality, distance in place of immersion (Ong, Reference Ong1977, pp. 20–21; Reference Ong1982, p. 72), and thereby both the construction and ordering of the world and others as object/s. This mode of knowledge production centres the subject as sovereign. It also effects an operation of violence and domination through the installation of reason over activity, theory over practice and intellectual over non-intellectual (Poster, Reference Poster1984, p. 59). The power of writing helps to generate the sovereign knowing self, giving both the knowing subject and scholarship the means to order others in their absence.

The link between the scholarly authorial voice and the sovereign knower is one reason to be sceptical about some aspects of the straightforward and common sense call to include Indigenous voices and perspectives as a strategy to engage IKs in the academy. While recognition and engagement are necessary to generate exchange among different forms of knowledge, they are not sufficient. The simple call to ‘incorporate IKs into conventional knowledge forms’ (Dei, Hall, & Rosenberg, Reference Dei, Hall, Rosenberg, Dei, Hall and Rosenberg2000, p. xv), for instance, risks reconfiguring and subordinating IKs on the terms of the sovereign knowing subject and WKs. Finding one's voice can be a conflicted process when Indigenous values and ways of being run up against the conventions of Western scholarship. The inclusion of Indigenous voices and perspectives frequently leads them to being processed in ways that meet the conventions of Western scholarship. Perhaps this is why, as Jackie Huggins notes, Aboriginal women have not tended to fully engage in contemporary theoretical feminist debates: To do so would perhaps involve entering into ‘yet another alien discourse and institution designed by and for whites without any consultation with Black people’ (1998, pp. 35–36).

The process of finding one's voice helps to construct a sovereign knower, and yet while the author's voice is (apparently) singular, the audience that the author imagines is multiple — it includes those for whom the writing would resonate as well as those who might actively contest the interpretations and analysis developed. The audience is therefore not strictly outside the author. There is, then, already a multiplicity inhabiting the I. Further, the knower can only emerge through relationships with the world. A wide range of experiences and interactions influence the words that flow from fingertips to screen to page. An array of relationships as well as forces, materials, procedures are in play. Biological, chemical and electrical forces transform and act upon materials in processes that circulate through wires, air, senses and physical movements. Commonplace assumptions and practices of WKs combine this ensemble of relationships, forces, materials and processes into the sovereign knowing subject, yet the fiction cannot deny the multiplicity that is brought to bear through the writer and knower.

The multiplicity of relations that bring the knower into being suggest possibilities for susceptibility to ways of being and knowing that connect with IKs and ameliorate returning to the sovereign self. Conceiving and practicing the self as an unfolding ensemble that connects with and is susceptible to external and unfamiliar forces and relations of the world and cultural others offers one way of being exposed and vulnerable to other perspectives. This approach disturbs rather than confirms the feedback loops that produce more conventional sovereign selves and accompanying institutional arrangements and practices which bypass and disavow cultural difference. Some options for unfolding the sovereign knowing self are relatively straightforward, even prosaic. Researchers and educators can get out from behind the desk to engage and build relationships with Indigenous peoples and communities. These relationships invariably carry responsibilities that can make researchers, with willingness, become aware of and susceptible to Indigenous concerns and ways of knowing. In turn, Western researchers may be drawn into Indigenous processes of knowledge production (e.g., see Lloyd et al., Reference Lloyd, Suchet-Pearson, Wright, Burarrwanga and Bawaka2012).

Other options, which build upon relationships, may be more esoteric. Elsewhere, for instance, I have explored, though autoethnographic methodology, how complexes of Aboriginal forces can catch and carry me in the body of white researcher (see Brigg Reference Brigg2008, pp. 133–138). The cultural politics of knowledge production requires proceeding with extreme caution with these types of approaches because the phenomenon of the white man claiming access to Indigenous forces is a longstanding trope in the effacement and replacement of Indigenous people by colonisers (Bell, Reference Bell2014). Nonetheless, these experiences also unsettle WKs because to speak of a complex of forces, and to come to know through these forces, is to signal phenomena that cannot be readily explained by — and that escapes the bounds of — conventional Western science. What is crucial here, as with engaging with Indigenous peoples and communities, is not drawing upon apparently exotic ways of knowing. Rather, it is that the knower, rather than circling back to his/her being and the institutional common sense of mainstream WKs, can become open and vulnerable to alternative ways of being and knowing, and to know relationally rather than (wholly) as a sovereign. This enables that the Western knower become an agent who allows IKs to stand rather one that facilitates their assimilation to the sovereign knower and WKs.

There are many other options for engaging IKs from within WKs that may facilitate relational ways of knowing. These include drawing upon pragmatism, poststructuralism, complexity theory, chaos theory, quantum physics and the recent burgeoning of interest in relationality per se. As Gregory Cajete notes, for instance, chaos theory and quantum physics ‘have brought Western science closer to understanding nature as Native peoples have always understood it — that is, that nature is not simply a collection of objects, but rather a dynamic, ever-flowing river of creation inseparable from our own perceptions’ (2000, p. 15). As suggested above, there is likely to be at least as much mileage to be made by increasing familiarity of the workings of knowledges within the Western tradition, and by working with lesser recognised WKs to engage IKs, rather than attempting to incorporate IKs within dominant WKs that have been and may well remain indifferent, unaccommodating or hostile.

In this section, I have worked from within WKs to explore the possibilities for creating a bridge to IKs through relational ways of being and knowing. The approach I have sketched aims to undercut the position of the sovereign knower in WKs to facilitate greater attention to the possibilities of relationality. This is not to suggest that knowledge is relativistic, not least because IKs recognise absolutes, framed as Law (Graham, Reference Graham1999) or power (Wagner, Reference Wagner1986, p. xiv) for instance. Absolutes exist in IK, but they are established through relational processes rather than by asserting the authority of a sovereign knower or one knowledge tradition as can occur in WKs. Following Meillassoux (Reference Meillassoux, Brassier and Badiou2008), we might say that IKs accept a precritical outside to thought where mainstream social science WKs tend not to. This leads WKs and WK knowers to return to and assert themselves over and above other peoples through the figure of the quasi-transcendental sovereign knower. Re-connecting and re-grounding this knower through the relationships that are necessary for the practices of knowledge production in which he/she is engaged, including with Indigenous peoples and communities, offers one way of seriously engaging IKs in the academy.