Knowing what you're doing

Knowledge, however interesting, can never be disinterested. Modes of explanation need themselves to be explained in terms of the biases and purposes generating them. Given this realization, an apprehension embedded in our intellectual tradition since at least the sophists, explanatory accounts and the often implicit styles of understanding that inform them have inevitably generated critiques that seek to situate such received interpretations in the specific conditions of their production. It may thus be illuminating to approach Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a theory of practice by invoking a somewhat parallel text that sought to expose a received manner of accounting for social phenomena Charles Dickens's Hard times. In his characterization of a particular manner of compiling knowledge the supposedly objective statistical procedures upon which government reports in the form of ‘blue books’ dealing with diplomatic matters and issues of political economy depended Dickens highlighted the limitations of a type of knowledge Bourdieu criticizes in its more recent incarnation: