Election 2000 and the Production of the Unknowable

As the 2000 US Presidential election demonstrated, many of the findings of science and technology studies (S&TS) about calibration, witnessing, credibility, expertise, and technological systems are relevant to the domain of electoral politics. But in addition to providing an occasion for congratulating ourselves on how much we have already learned, the episode surrounding the Florida vote also offers an opportunity to engage in a more critical self-reflexive exercise. Research in S&TS often asks how knowledge is produced and spread, but very few studies take as their primary focus efforts to eliminate the possibility of knowing something. The Florida episode raises the question of whether the field devotes enough attention to the production of the unknowable. Should our discipline expend a greater proportion of its energy studying the production of absences of knowledge? Should we pay more attention to the processes that restrict the flow of knowledge, and spread knowledge incapacity, in highly selective ways, throughout societies? These issues, to be sure, have not been entirely neglected. Most scholars in S&TS recognize that the suppression, containment and destruction of knowledges are inextricably entangled with their production and spread. We are all aware that new facts often displace existing ones, and that technologies succeed each other through a process of creative destruction. We know that systems of classification obscure some phenomena even as they bring others into focus. We know that expertise is fundamentally relational and that experts often silence non-expert voices. We know that all ways of seeing make some things invisible. We know, in short, that the production and suppression of knowledge are entangled in a dynamic or better, dialectical relationship with one another.