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Introduction

Toward the Common Task

What is the point of scholarship? In any other time, this might have seemed a churlish question to ask. But in the United States and increasingly elsewhere too, the question now calls up three equally prompt and self-evident kinds of answers.

One response is that it has no point at all. This is now an opinion with a lot of powerful backing. Another is that it has no point other than to socialize the high-risk work of invention, so that private interests can do the lower risk work of “innovation” and profit from it. The third answer protests these other two but not in particularly satisfying terms. Scholarship is hard to defend as a means to enlightenment or liberation; these seem rather abstract and now self-undermining goals.¹ Ironically, scholarship about the limits to enlightenment and liberation casts doubt on the scholarship as much as the other two lines of questioning.

There is a fourth answer, but it does not get much traction any more: scholarship is an end in itself, a free and self-directed inquiry that takes its own time.² It describes, at best, what might happen in elite institutions propped up by the venerable seed money of slave owners, robber barons, or an imperial state, but not what the rest of us get to do. It is too remote a utopia from the actually existing university that runs on debt and precarious labor.³

The mission of scholarship appears so hollowed out today that some advocate a more fugitive means of study, one that treats the university as a resource (and not much more) in which to create the under commons, with its own pedagogy and forms of collaboration.⁴ That has a lot to recommend it, were it not that there seem to be problems at such a scale that such a practice cannot grasp. There may soon not be an institution for the under commons to be under.

Instead let me start by saying something simple: that scholarship is about the common task of knowing the world.⁵ Each of those little words contains multitudes. Common refers to what is shared but also the ordinary, even the vulgar. Task demarcates a kind of labor, but it is also a kind of play. The action behind the verb knowing connects the shared and ordinary, the laboring but playful activities already telegraphed in this little phrase.

The most difficult but also capacious word here is, of course, world. Perhaps it is best approached indirectly, through the parable of the blind scholars and their elephant: Each touches, senses, and knows a part of the elephant and declares the elephant to be like what they touch: tusklike, trunklike, or taillike. Each hears the other saying something incompatible with the thing that they themselves touch.

The first limit to the parable is that maybe there’s no whole elephant to be seen, either.⁶ A scholar who could see the elephant would not know any better than the blind ones, because while the account by the scholar who sees might include the grey color of its skin, they may know nothing of its texture or smell. Nobody gets to know the totality.

The second limit to this parable is that it may not even be possible to combine all of these partial accounts of the elephant into a true and whole picture of the elephant as a totality, as a world. The parts don’t quite add up to a whole. Each way of knowing shapes in part the thing it comes to know, producing parts that are parts of different wholes. Knowing is never quite going to come together again, and there may be nothing at all helpful any more in the fiction that it might.

This was always the paradox about the project of knowing the world. The knowing depended on myths that posit a whole, unknown world at the start and another, different whole world, the unity of the world of knowledge, at the end. The knowing is in between two things that are some kind of non-knowledge, an imagined start and a projected future. Nobody much believes in this anymore. Knowledge has lost its religion, that which bound it together, through time and across the disciplines.⁷ It is futile to try and hide this from anyone, least of all ourselves. The university, like the church before it, is now a habit without gods.

Knowledge doesn’t add up. Nothing guarantees that its parts are parts of a whole. There is no shortage of attempts to fill this void with claims to privileged knowledge of the world as a totality. All will be well, each discipline tells us, if we accept their world as sovereign, as the true totality, as the whole elephant. Some of these claims to world-knowing are so powerful that they are also world-making. The economists and the engineers, for example, claim there are worlds that lend themselves to calculation or solution, respectively. The world is only resources to be allocated or problems to be solved.

Less powerful ways of knowing point out the limitations of such worlds but are blind to the limitations of their own sphere. The scholar of literature or philosopher or anthropologist or historian can be fulsome in their critique of others but have little to say about their own extravagant counterclaims to sovereignty. They are also prone to a sort of pathetic will-to-power, in which they claim an imaginary sovereignty over the world as it ought to be in the face of more powerful ways of knowing the world that can affect how it is.

So rather than claim to see the elephant whole, or claim to perceive with one’s inner eye what an ideal elephant should be, let’s just acknowledge that all forms of knowing come to know only a part of the world. Every way of producing knowledge is enabling, and its particular techniques make parts of the world knowable. And yet every way of producing knowledge is also blind to what it does not perceive outside of its own form of knowing.⁸

This state of things is particularly troubling, given that there’s a widespread sense that the world, whatever it is, and whatever it may be, is in a lot of trouble. That is the elephant in the room. The most common name for this at the moment is the Anthropocene. In an earlier book, Molecular Red, I started to ask about what might constitute theory for the Anthropocene.⁹ I now add that I think it is timely to ask what a practice of knowledge for the Anthropocene could be, particularly if we take the COVID-19 pandemic to be not just a global crisis of applied knowledge in its own right, but a preview of what demands the Anthropocene will continue to place on knowledge production.

Each way of knowing the world touches a part of the elephant. Rather than give in to claims to know the whole elephant in advance, let’s work out collaboratively, as a common task, some practices of putting parts of the elephant as we sense and know them next to one another. Not so much to produce a seamless picture of the whole, but to understand the differences between all of the partial sensings. The common task is to produce a knowledge of the world made up of the differences between ways of knowing it.

In this book, I want to look at three different ways of knowing the world, to find points of contact between them and also points of difference. Those three ways of knowing are centered respectively on aesthetics, ethnography, and design. One way to think about this might be that it starts with surfaces, with the aesthetic form of cultural and media artifacts through which the world appears. Then it moves on to ways of knowing how different kinds of humans connect to those surfaces, broadly conceived as enthnographic. And finally we turn to the technical, to the design of informatics machines that humans will interact with and within.

I chose to start with aesthetics because, being from media studies, I think our access to the world is always mediated. It helps to pay attention to the forms in which the world is sensed, to how your awareness of your part of the elephant is mediated. If the sensory apparatus taken as a whole is the sensorium, then perhaps we could think in a more plural way about different sensoria, here conceived as a plurality of cultural, technical, and social forms of apparatus through which the world is known. The common task might then be (in part at least) the work of putting sensoria in play, with and against one another, while limiting the claim of each to be sovereign over the others.

The various sensoria might thus be the different worlds we think we know, but where the appearance of a world is an artifact not only of the design of the way of sensing some part of the world but of habits that have accumulated about the world to which that part might belong. All ways of knowing are mixes of the empirical and the rational, of perceptions and conceptions. Rather than attempt to cure misperception through reason, or unreason through sensation, perhaps it’s a matter of mapping the borders of different bundles of reason and perception as they congeal together in particular ways of knowing.

The common task of knowing the world reverses the relation between the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary. To the disciplinarian, the interdisciplinary is always something of an afterthought. It does not challenge but rather reaffirms the sovereignty of the disciplines. It proclaims that because there are disciplines, sovereign over the objects of knowledge at their center, then the interdisciplinary can only exist at the margins to affirm the disciplines as centers. But what if we reverse this procedure? It is only the edges of ways of knowing that are interesting.

That different ways of knowing cannot really be reconciled is not a bug but a feature of the common task. The problematic and unsettled concepts at the margin might be the most interesting and useful things that any way of knowing can offer another. Thus the world might be known provisionally, speculatively, tentatively, without any one way of knowing having to be sovereign over the others.

Another parable might be useful here. What is the surface area of the elephant? According to the internet, it could be up to eighty-eight meters squared.¹⁰ But if we looked more closely, with a finer resolution, it could be even more than eighty-eight meters squared. At the finer resolution, the folds in its skin reveal yet more folds. What if we increase the resolution still more? There are yet more folds, more surface. On and on we could go.

One could say that each successive view at a higher resolution is more accurate. But is it more true? Is it more useful? Is it more knowledge? In some contexts, surely; but in others, surely not. Where qualitative forms of knowledge are concerned, the whole structure of knowledge production seems to be organized around more detail. The “but it is more complicated than that” position is treated as a winning argument. The less addressed problem in knowledge production is how to pull back from the scale where the details expand to fill one’s sensoria to a less detailed but still useful or interesting picture, one in which other things besides our own special interest might come into view.

The common task of knowing the world is not an end in itself. Nor can it come to an end and produce a conclusive knowledge. It is always only temporary and provisional. The common task is a detour on the way to something more important.¹¹ That something might now be the other common task of enduring in the world provisionally, incompletely, named the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene names a world transformed by collective human labor under the power of the commodity form. That world appears increasingly hostile to the endurance not just of our species-being but of many others as well.

It is tempting to cast this as a crisis.¹² As a narrative device, crisis focuses attention, but it can short-circuit the common task of producing a knowledge of this world of the Anthropocene. There’s a rush to rename it, and in renaming it, call it something that makes it the special property of a particular way of knowing the world, to the exclusion of all others. It becomes an alibi for exacerbating the problem of knowing the world, at a time when not knowing is itself a key part of the problem.

This is when the elephant in the room called the Anthropocene is even acknowledged. A lot of knowledge production still gaily jets around as if this was somebody else’s department. But as my friend and New School colleague Dominic Pettman says: “Elephants are too polite to mention the human in the room.” Or rather, the world’s indifference to us, its negative presence as that which, in its generality, does not really appear in any particular technical and cultural sensorium, becomes the thing that can only appear, if at all, out of a common task. This is a common task that I think is best conducted on the basis of a rough equality of all ways of knowing. Not everything is knowledge, but there might not be any universal way of knowing what is knowledge and what isn’t.

Sensoria contains brief assessments, focusing on key concepts, of twenty-odd general intellects, some of whom are well-known.¹³ I have tried to look beyond my New York–centric view of the world and beyond the confines of the academy. Not surprisingly, I have failed in the task of producing a completely diversified overview; I have just the parts of the elephant I can touch from where I stand.

In my reading, all of these general intellects manage to generate out of their particular ways of working some concepts that can be connected or contrasted with others derived from other kinds of knowledge work. That to me is what a general intellect is: someone who generates concepts out of particular knowledge work in particular departments of the intellectual division of labor. Not all are academics; some are artists or writers. Art and literature seem to me to have analogous problems to scholarship in the common task of knowing the world.

This book is meant to be useful. At the low resolution view, where you take in a fair swath of elephant but with not much detail, what I think is most useful are concepts. I’m looking for ways to compress and condense by focusing on concepts. If a good fact is mostly true about something in particular, a good concept is slightly true about a lot of things. Both fall short of the common task of knowing the world. That can only be begun by lacing concepts together from different labors. It is toward that objective that this book is aimed.