The Limits of Epistemic Control, the Powers of Actualization, and the Moral Economies of a Fictional Collective

This essay narrates from a collective of social scientists giving up on the phantasy of ‘being in,’ or ‘having’ epistemic control, not–however–on the ‘dream of epistemic democracy’. This community does not feel ‘prepost-truth’ nostalgia. And when there is a special issue asking ‘what are possible reconfigurations of collaborative research beyond control?’, they reply: ‘we are not sure, but we are in the mood to figure it out.’ This mood is not related to the naïve assumption that knowledge production was nota powerful control machine in its own right, or that issues of control could be ignored or dismissed as vanities. It is built upon the feeling that dynamics of epistemic control cannot be escaped, but can and should be played and experimented with. The essay makes use of Lorraine Daston’s conception of a‘moral economy of science’ to fictionalize the ‘mental state’ of such a collective of social scientists and the ‘emotional forces’ integral to their ways of performing research.