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Knowledge and Its Pretenders

Join us for the next instalment of our Political Mind series, with speaker David Bell.

This paper uses “pretender” in both its familiar sense - what imitates knowledge - and its older sense, as in a “pretender to the throne”: that which seeks to usurp knowledge and replace it with substitutes.

It examines how thought-provoking ideas are subtly transformed as their offspring harden into dogma, ritual, religiosity, and moralism, displacing reflective understanding with the mere accumulation of facts.

Cultures develop their own modes of self-explanation, but like symptoms, these conceal as much as they reveal. Psychoanalysis is thus well placed to engage critically with the forms of consciousness that shape our age. The ideology of the market, for example, has so permeated social consciousness that it appears as “normal.” This chapter, in a longstanding psychoanalytic tradition, problematises that apparent normality. It explores the forms of subjectivity it produces and sustains, with reflections on socio-economic crisis, welfare, the psychological effects of rising inequality, and an archaic tendency toward moralised binaries. In doing so, it shows how, under this ideology, knowledge of the world is displaced by its various “pretenders.”

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