English |
VUNW: Knowledge |
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English |
VUNW: Knowledge |
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Knowledge seems to be bound to places – libraries, monasteries, universities, museums, research institutions. Such an understanding of knowledge symbolically expresses the subjection of the production of knowledge under some power. Therefore this is connected with real knowledge and its production insofar as the history of knowledge in buildings and in knowledge constructs is tendentially the history of restriction, the prevention, the destruction of knowledge.
Knowledge on the contrary is alive because of the interaction of human beings. Because of this it creates itself anew constantly, it arises in communication. The structures of knowledge are therefore not determined by buildings, but by their forms of expression (the languages of science), by the frameworks for thinking in interaction (financial support), by their methodologies (structures of approaches), by the determination of their subject matter. Therefore one important thesis has a greater effect and validity than all university buildings of the world (which are, however, necessary for teaching, libraries, administration and reproductions etc.)
Knowledge Production
The image of knowledge production is determined even now by the stylisation that individual men and women are portrayed as knowledge producers. Their idealised activities are instrumentalised as leitmotif, in order to be able to present stories about the development of knowledge. For presentation of science means for the media to be able to tell stories.
Nevertheless such representations offer a chance to recognize that production of knowledge has to do with cognition. But at the latest at the transition from little science to big science (Derek J. De Solla Price) things are changing dramatically and the importance of the framework increases.
On the one hand there is the necessity to avoid duplications – especially in industrial research, where often large amounts of capital are involved. On the other hand the proposals for the European University show that networking, interaction, communication are the most important factors (and not the assembly in a central building).
As far as Centrope is concerned there remains the necessity of new infrastructures in this context and in this sense. The most important problems are at this time the inequality of chances for knowledge production because of unequal means for preparation, pre-financing, execution (infrastructures) of projects, but also the central determination of complexes of themes and the arbitrariness of administrations. All this and more restricts the possibilities for reproductions, innovations, equal use of the (virtual) possibilities and contradicts the legal framework of Europe, as well as the constitutions of the countries, which are part of Centrope.