Let me start this reflection with a comment going back to the second week of this semester when Patrick Tomsen explained the importance of genealogy, that “it is iterative, living, and shifts with the lived experiences of the researcher in relation to the society they live.” Essentially that the production of knowledge and the history of it is a moving beast. Researchers must constantly grapple with the temporal and cultural aspects of knowledge, this is something that Foucault realised especially in his works and why he emphasised historical analysis as a conduit for the revelation of power. This was also highlighted in the notes from the Power and Inequity Panel on how power disrupts and reveals.
What I found interesting in the discussion was the reference to what counts as legitimate knowledge, and how some studies end up seen as more trivial or less valuable than others. The epistemic dimensions of power help us understand that we are often relying on past genealogies of knowledge to frame our relation to a subject. Across time two of the key communications of past knowledge have come through music and writing. It is important to recognise, as Derrida did that, that these texts were monopolised by those with power across most time periods, therefore the knowledge they produced can often hold a disruptive power inequality.
Thus, fields like Musicology can be diminished in their legitimacy not by virtue of their actual potential but by the power of the genealogy that frames them and where that genealogy comes from. I’ve seen this in the reviews my brother writes while he studies for a doctorate in Musicology at Columbia. His ability to use opera reviews to highlight colonial injustice, to provide exposes on the discourse surrounding the morality of illness indicate to me that legitimising bodies of knowledge often requires reconstructing the genealogies surrounding them through both cultural and historical analysis.
To create more equitable research requires a reevaluation of the genealogies which produce our knowledge and therefore our frames, crucial to this is lived experience as it balances knowledge which is often guaranteed to be in discourse with the experiences of those within that power system.
To do so demands the use of research techniques which take into account changes across epistemes and utilise cultural experiences to produce a body of knowledge that power systems might otherwise prefer to leave unnamed and untouchable.
