The transition from disciplinary coherence to infrastructural coordination marks a decisive transformation in the architecture of knowledge, wherein epistemic authority no longer arises primarily from bounded scholarly communities but from the infrastructural assemblages that mediate, compress, and circulate knowledge across hybrid human–machine systems. Under conditions of post-coherence, legitimacy emerges through co-functionality across difference, where databases, algorithms, institutions, and symbolic markers operate in layered coordination without requiring epistemic consensus. This shift redefines knowledge organization from a classificatory enterprise into a coordinative mediation practice, concerned less with stabilising truth than with enabling functional alignment among heterogeneous epistemic actors. A clear illustration appears in AI-assisted research environments, where literature databases, citation metrics, and generative models form polytemporal systems that compress months of scholarly synthesis into minutes, thereby producing simulated coherence that retains the form of scholarship while redistributing its epistemic labour. In this context, breakdowns—hallucinated citations, symbolic drift in terms like “peer review,” or institutional lag—become diagnostic moments revealing hidden dependencies and power structures embedded in epistemic infrastructures. Consequently, the central task of contemporary knowledge organization becomes infrastructural reflexivity: the capacity to analyse, adapt, and redesign the material–symbolic systems through which knowledge becomes authoritative. Knowledge, therefore, is no longer primarily a property of communities or texts, but an emergent effect of infrastructural coordination operating across technological, institutional, and symbolic domains within a permanently unstable epistemic environment. Kelly, M. (2025) Situated Epistemic Infrastructures: A Diagnostic Framework for Post-Coherence Knowledge.
