5 - Knowing and Being Known

Summary

Foucault problematizes the relationship between knowledge and power in ways that more traditional epistemology has not, with power always already shaping what we consider knowledge. To capture the nexus between power and knowledge, he introduces the term “episteme.” The significance of an era’s episteme is easiest to see in terms of what it does to possibilities of self-knowledge. Therefore I pay special attention to this theme by way of introducing the theoretical depth of Foucault’s notion. I then develop Foucault’s ideas further, specifically for digital lifeworlds. With this vocabulary in place, I introduce the notion of “epistemic actorhood” that lets us capture the place of an individual in a given episteme. It is in terms of this place that we can turn to the notions of epistemic rights and epistemic justice. Epistemic actorhood comes with the four roles of individual epistemic subject, collective epistemic subject, individual epistemic object, and collective epistemic object. Using this vocabulary we can then also articulate the notions of an epistemic right and of epistemic justice and develop them in the context of digital lifeworlds. Digital lifeworlds engage individuals both as knowers and knowns in new ways. The framework introduced in this chapter captures this point.