McKenzie Wark - Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

Sensoria

Sensoria

Thinkers for the
Twenty-First Century

McKenzie Wark

First published by Verso 2020

McKenzie Wark 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-506-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-505-6 (HBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-508-7 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-507-0 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

In memory of Niall Lucy

Contents

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. 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.

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.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. 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 theres no whole elephant to be seen, either. 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 dont 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 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 doesnt 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 ones inner eye what an ideal elephant should be, lets 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.

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, lets 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.