By Clare Birchall
A voice on past due evening radio tells you speedy nutrients eating place injects its meals with medications that make males impotent. A colleague asks in the event you imagine the FBI was once in on 11th of September. An alien abductee on the net claims extra-terrestrials have planted a microchip in her physique. "Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal" shouts front web page of a gossip magazine. a religious healer claims he can treatment continual fatigue syndrome with the energizing strength of crystals . . . What do you think? wisdom is going Pop examines the preferred knowledges that saturate our daily adventure. We make this data after which it shapes the best way we see the area. How legitimate is it when put next to reliable wisdom and why does such (mis)information reason rather a lot institutional anxiousness? This publication examines the diversity of information, from conspiracy conception to standard gossip, and its function and effect in our tradition.
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Extra info for Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Culture Machine)
Example text
Rather, these knowledges are simply discussed as one form of socially situated knowledge among others. As Doyle McCarthy explains, knowledge in sociology means: knowledge-of-reality or whatever information and ideas inform what we hold to be real and true about our worlds and ourselves. Knowledges are those organized and perpetuated ways of thinking and acting that enable us to direct ourselves to objects in our world (persons, things, and events) and to see them as something. (1996: 22) Obviously, the ways of knowing that I describe in this book enable us to manage and organize the material world – they construct our social reality.
Evidence of this can be found in the inclusion of an entry for ‘knowledge’ in New Keywords (2005) edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris: a rewriting of Raymond Williams’ classic text in which he passes over ‘K’ without pause. In early cultural studies coming out of a socialist tradition, a Marxist concern over false consciousness dominated the discussion. Subjects had, it would seem, an inaccurate picture of society; they adopted ‘official’ knowledge (or the popular, ‘commonsense’ knowledge – from position B in Figure 1 – which supports the ‘official’ knowledge) about their place in the world, naturalizing social inequality and the subjugation of the working class.
This, for Brown, is because left academics, instead of facing the disorientation and loss experienced when trying to analyse the sources of social injustice, ‘posture as if we were still fighting the big and good fight in our clamor over words and names’ (Brown 2001: 36). In other words, the fight is fought over the wrong issues: the fight is kept alive, but the goal is long since obscured. Here, moralizing takes the place of mourning or critique. A similar logic, I want to suggest, is at work in some strands of cultural studies.