Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HYB-KNOW (Hybrid Knowledge Society)
Période du rapport: 2023-09-15 au 2025-09-14
The concept of the knowledge society emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in sociological and economic scholarship. According to the standard interpretation, the knowledge society refers to several significant changes in the structure of the industrial society: the rising prominence of scientific and higher education institutions in economic production and governance, the increasing intersections between the public and private sectors in the generation of knowledge, the expanding use of technology in society from automation to the digital infrastructure, and the growing significance of experts in public discourse. However, the standard interpretation is relatively narrow in the kinds of actors and processes it includes within its domain; for instance, knowledge is conceived in technocratic terms, while the definition of society follows the nature–culture separation with limited room for environmental concerns.
Therefore, given the criticisms posed by Environmental Humanities and Anthropocene studies, which have called for a broader conception of knowledge and a stronger integration of social and natural dimensions in light of the contemporary environmental polycrisis, the HYB-KNOW project proposed to expand the historical and conceptual understanding of the knowledge society. More specifically, the project sought to situate the knowledge society concept within a broader examination of 20th-century developments by researching diverse social and economic sources along with environmentally oriented material. The objective was to elaborate an updated conception of the knowledge society, along with new fields of application.
Therefore, given the criticisms posed by Environmental Humanities and Anthropocene studies, which have called for a broader conception of knowledge and a stronger integration of social and natural dimensions in light of the contemporary environmental polycrisis, the HYB-KNOW project proposed to expand the historical and conceptual understanding of the knowledge society. More specifically, the project sought to situate the knowledge society concept within a broader examination of 20th-century developments by researching diverse social and economic sources along with environmentally oriented material. The objective was to elaborate an updated conception of the knowledge society, along with new fields of application.
The research started with a parallel examination of the Anthropocene and knowledge society literatures. The examination highlighted the prominence of a shared concept between the two literatures: social and industrial metabolism. The concept of metabolism opened up the possibility of connecting the knowledge society literature with environmental concerns, while also facilitating the inclusion of knowledge-production-related dimensions into metabolism studies. Subsequently, the research built on this foundation by increasing the range of the investigated sources and drawing on the cybernetics, biopolitics, and Earth system science literatures. This second step retained the multifocal orientation provided by the metabolism concept. The results revealed that since the start of the 20th century, the literature adjacent to the knowledge society exhibited a strong preoccupation with the planet understood as a socio-economic category. This introduction of the concept and problem of the planet provided a new perspective on the knowledge society: on the one hand, the planet was considered a series of metabolic processes; on the other hand, researchers posited the future emergence of the noosphere and technosphere, understood as new independent components of the planet. In this context, the knowledge society appeared to be less a technocratic concept preoccupied with growing numbers of patents and more of a social structure that was supposed to mediate the transition within a broader planetary development.
As a result of this research, the HYB-KNOW project started to develop an expanded understanding of societal reproduction, in which the basic unit of analysis is no longer an isolated society with limited relations to its environment. Instead, expanded societal reproduction attempts to consider human–environment reproduction relations within the framework of the planetary system, in which knowledge is not only a subjective category but also an objective element of geological agency.
As a result of this research, the HYB-KNOW project started to develop an expanded understanding of societal reproduction, in which the basic unit of analysis is no longer an isolated society with limited relations to its environment. Instead, expanded societal reproduction attempts to consider human–environment reproduction relations within the framework of the planetary system, in which knowledge is not only a subjective category but also an objective element of geological agency.
HYB-KNOW contributed to multiple academic fields, including the history of science and knowledge, early modern and modern history, critical and continental philosophy, environmental humanities, and critical social studies. The project proposed a new vocabulary and grammar for interpreting societal reproduction: metabolism, planet, and geological agency, among others. In addition, HYB-KNOW has helped elaborate the experimental field of geoanthropology, which investigates the relationship between the planet and its inhabitants, specifically as modified by human science, technology, and society. In the future, the emerging field of geoanthropology should be consolidated, while the expanded theory of societal–planetary reproduction, along with its metabolic implications, needs to be pursued further. One line of possible research would be to trace the developments of geoanthropology across related disciplines, such as geology, and deeper into the past, such as the 18th and 19th centuries.