All knowledge production is socially formed and power-laden

Evidence

I have long maintained that Said’s apt and overdue critique of Orientalism has been wrongly fetishized in his person and politics; what is important is his criticism of a particularly nasty mode of knowledge production. Long before he wrote his groundbreaking Orientalism, before Michel Foucault unearthed the relationship between knowledge and power, a sustained tradition in the sociology of knowledge had already shown that the creative consciousness of the individual is socially formed and collectively cadenced—and thus without a socially predicated prejudice and power no mode of knowledge is possible. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 484

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior highlights on Milgrom’s law-merchant and social capital work — both treat institutions as socially embedded knowledge systems, echoing the sociology-of-knowledge tradition Dabashi invokes. — connects to: All social objectivity is constituted through power and exclusion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The point that Said’s critique gets fetishized as a person while the deeper sociology-of-knowledge tradition is forgotten is a nuanced meta-argument about how knowledge itself is institutionalized and depoliticized — ‘collective amnesia… traceable to the depoliticized practice of sociological theory’.

Related

• Said’s Orientalism rested on a pre-existing sociology-of-knowledge tradition. (similarity 0.89)
• The sociology of knowledge preceded and grounds Said’s critique of Orientalism (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalism’s triumph caused a collective amnesia about earlier knowledge-power theory (similarity 0.85)
• Said’s Orientalism overshadowed the sociology-of-knowledge tradition it drew on (similarity 0.85)
• Fields of knowledge are constrained by society, culture, and institutional power (similarity 0.81)
• All social objectivity is constituted through power and exclusion. (similarity 0.80)