Andrej Grubačić: In Praise of Agnotology (09 April 2023)
Channel: Network for an Alternative Quest
Date: 2023-05-29

Session IV: Education 
4.1 Andrej Grubačić: In Praise of Agnotology: The Politics of Knowledge in Democratic Modernity 

This talk focuses on the social and political significance of Agnotology, or the science of (politically and socially constructed) ignorance in the history of capitalist modernity. Ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle. Capitalist modernity is indeed founded on ignorance, or, better yet, on it's organized production. The history of democratic modernity, however, is much more than the history of nameless victims of academic disinterest: it is a magnificent history of integral education, autonomous universities, libertarian pedagogies, model and Modern schools, worker universities, deschoolers and freescholers. Building on this vast and suppressed  paideia of democratic modernity, Abdullah Öcalan proposes a Sociology of Freedom, a careful excavation of democratic and incendiary knowledge historically produced as non-existent, and attempt to locate such Sociology within the epistemology and philosophy of a free and just society. 

Andrej Grubačić is the Chair of Anthropology and Social Change department at CIIS -San Francisco. He is the editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research, affiliated faculty at UC Berkeley, and collaborating researcher at the University of Coimbra. He is the author and co-author of a number of books, including “Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid” (UC Press 2016), “Don't Mourn Balkanize” (PM Press 2011) and “Wobblies and Zapatistas” (PM Press 2009).