‘So That All May See’: An Interrogation of Knowledge Generation in the Post-colony

Abstract

Discourses on geopolitics of knowledge have for long focused on distribution of knowledge artifacts as a marker of West‟s domination. But following Mignolo and focusing on enunciation, we centre-stage the geo- and body-politics of knowledge- the knower, known and the knowing in the process of displacement of dominance. Through an exploration and interrogation of a surgical invention in „stem cell therapy‟ in ophthalmology at a clinic-cum-research site in India, we show that only through the mutual imbrication of the socio-economic-cultural sensibility of the geo-historically located innovator surgeon and the immanent scientific logic of stem cells therapy that displacement occurs in geo-politics of knowledge. We argue that mutual imbrication happens through the „location‟ becoming implicated in the known and the knowing thereby equipping the knower in a mutually constitutive manner. Such implication of the „local‟ can occur only when a knowledge-artifact is yet to be concretised in the Simondonian sense, i.e, is open and still in the making. Dialogic relations between the knower and the known allow locally informed transductive leaps of imagination in an open knowledge artifact.