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Friends of the Sea. Certifiers are major facilitators of knowledge moving from the
realms of FAO into the far corners of the world via the fisheries they certify and their
certified products. Eco-certified products are also market devices. Along with
sustainability guides, they reconfigure the consumption of seafood and articulate what
is and therefore what is not sustainable.
In summary, sustainability knowledge encompasses the capacity to measure
what is and is not sustainable. The knowledge network is made in spaces such as
those I have just described, where knowledge is produced and reproduced. Such
networks respond to crises and are also mediums through which knowledge
circulates. Sustainability/market devices are mechanisms of this network, offering
further opportunity for sustainability discourses to be enacted.
Conclusion
As we have seen in this chapter, when we understand the relationship of knowledge
production to the rules of knowledge at a particular time and in a particular social
situation, then power takes on a productive form. That is, existing conditions make it
possible for some practices and knowledge to, as Canguilhem outlined, ‘extend’,
opening up spaces for new forms of knowledge production (in Bove` 1995, p. 55).
Bove` suggests that this is:
…control by the power of positive production: that is a kind of power that
generates certain kinds of questions; a kind of power, placed within
systems that legitimate, support, and answer those questions, a kind of
power that, in the process, includes within its system all those it produces
as agents capable of acting within them. (1995, p. 54)
In this passage Bove` situates power not as a conscious act of repression but a making
possible, an opening up of specific fields of possibility that ‘constitutes entire
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