Reconceptualising Counter-Knowledge Orders

It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig. His work is usually on mis- and disinformation, and he is interested in the underlying conditions of the digital knowledge society which supported the emergence of such information (dis)orders. His key concept here is the idea of counter-knowledge orders, with particular focus on the far right.

In contemporary society, falsehood is identified as a ‘disorder’; the conditions of the digital knowledge society include transparency, surveillance, belonging, and knowing, and these influence how we perceive and know ourselves as knowers with and in opposition to others. Everything is information, everything has to be contributed as information, and the informed citizen’s duty is to be a life-long learner – this is the identity we are charged to perform.

Life-long learning has become an ideology of knowledge; some see this as supporting an epistocracy, where those who are ‘good’ at knowing are in power. But the knowledge order that this knowing is subordinated to is inherently contradictory; it constrains what we can and should know, and demands responsible knowing of the knower.

Any counter-knowledge order represents those who know differently; who resist the imperative to know, challenge the epistemic demands of the hegemonic knowledge order, and construct alternative knowledge hierarchies and approaches to knowing.

The far right is an example of such a counter-knowledge order; it can be understood less as a counter-public than as a defensive, resistant public that upholds older knowledge orders grounded in neo-conservative nostalgia and a sense of white superiority. From its perspective, being an empowered and responsible knower is easier for the far right because they do not have to listen to and respect others as knowers whom their knowledge order sees as inferior.

The far right also reclaims role access and dissolves contexts in its counter-knowledge order: it draws on ‘alternative facts’, ‘common sense’, and ‘doing your own research’ – doing things that the hegemonic knowledge order requires us to do by substituting its own alternative epistemologies. This (counter-)knowledge production and testing is mixed with and subsumed under the agendas of the fear right’s political activism, and validated by ‘laziness masters’: political and epistomological leaders who block further knowledge-seeking by validating these alternative knowledge processes.

How can this be addressed, then? Simply dismissing these counter-knowledge orders as false is insufficient and a simple ideological move; it does not resolve the underlying conflict. It perpetuates the ideological delusion that the hegemonic knowledge order is always right.