I'm currently in Williamsburg, Virginia. I'm here to attend a joint conference between the OIEAHC and SEA. Today I went to 3 or maybe it was 4 sessions. I heard 2 or 3 good papers and a handful of bad papers. In appreciation of the bad papers I heard, I share a poor paper that I wrote for one of my classes. I appreciate all of your critical comments and suggestions for improvement. [Note on paper: sorry for the bad footnote hyperlinks. I'm slowly learning HTML.]
“Coming Soon All Knowledge”: Traveling Knowledge Production
Wednesday May 9, 2007, a short, unattributed, paragraph appeared in The New York Times. The four-sentence paragraph probably escaped the attention of most readers. Above the paragraph, a bold headline proclaimed, “Coming Soon All Knowledge”! The paragraph described the creation of the Encyclopedia of Life by “some of the world’s leading institutions.” The Encyclopedia shall float in the ether of cyberspace and catalogue “everything they [“the world’s scientists”] know about all of the Earth’s 1.8 million species” of plants, animals, and living organisms. The New York Times claimed the Encyclopedia shall classify all biological “knowledge” by genus and species. On each organism’s assigned webpage, viewers can read “descriptions,” explore “maps,” view “videos,” and follow “links to entire genomes.” The cyber Encyclopedia of Life is the culmination of “Enlightenment” thought, the pinnacle of high “modernism.” The Encyclopedia shall not only classify existing organisms, but after organisms become extinct, thanks in part, to planetary warming, scientists can resurrect the dead with the assistance of “genome” maps. The Encyclopedia is an example of Enlightenment knowledge par excellence: an attempt to classify, organize, and categorize “all” existing knowledge and produce new knowledge.
The New York Times paragraph raises a number of intriguing themes: knowledge production; disciplinary classification of knowledge; taxonomic dilemmas of species, genus, and category; and the relationship between technology and knowledge. These themes are not “new,” twenty-first century phenomena. Their roots sprout within the soil of the eighteenth century, within the pages of texts written by Adam Smith (1723-1790) and Unca Eliza Winkfield. The essay through close, critical readings of fragments from Smith and Winkfield argues that the processes of Enlightenment knowledge production functioned as disciplinary mechanisms and self-disciplinary exercises. In addition, the classificatory, dividing, categorizing, and organizing impulses within the writings of Smith and Winkfield created multiple eighteenth-century realities. The essay concludes by returning to its beginning; to The Encyclopedia of Life, to examine how Enlightenment classificatory tendencies have multiplied and morphed in cyberspace thanks to a rapid increase in the speed of knowledge circulation. In addition, the essay shall meditate on how interactions with hyperlinked cyberspaces influence identity constructions.
In section two of The History of Astronomy, entitled, “Of Wonder, or the Effects of Novelty,” Smith suggested that “the mind” takes pleasure in understanding and organizing the “reality” it perceives. Smith wrote The History of Astronomy during the late-eighteenth century, during the historical moment Michel Foucault identifies as “disciplinary society.” Compared with sovereign power, disciplinary power “applies primarily to bodies and what they do rather than the land and what it produces.” Foucault claims a “binary schema” organized eighteenth-century disciplinary society. Disciplinarity was a technology of power, an “apparatus of knowledge” that operated through “constant surveillance,” classification, organization, coercion, separation, and normalization of individual bodies. Individuals internalized disciplinary society’s “economy of power” and regulated themselves. Self-discipline created normalized, generalizable individuals out of a population mass. Self-discipline and disciplinary society divided societies into multiple binaries. Along with disciplinary society arose specific, academic disciplines, such as sciences, medicine, psychiatry, and history.
Within the context of Foucault’s “disciplinary society,” Smith’s description of knowledge production appears as both a disciplinary and self-disciplinary exercise. As knowledge increases, categories multiple, divisions proliferate, and classificatory organization becomes more precise. Senses dull; surprise and wonder dissipate; admiration becomes the primary sensory experience. Smith wrote,
It is evident that the mind takes pleasure in observing the resemblances that are discoverable betwixt different objects. It is by means of such observations that it endeavours to arrange and methodise all its ideas, and to reduce them into proper classes and assortments. Where it can observe but one single quality, that is common to a great variety of otherwise widely different objects, that single circumstance will be sufficient for it to connect them all together, to reduce them to one common class, and to call them by one general name. … this is the origin of those assortments of objects and ideas which in the schools are called Genera and Species….
In Smith’s formulation, knowledge production was pleasurable. It was an enjoyable experience, “the mind takes pleasure in observing.” When “the mind” attempted to “arrange and methodise” its observations, it simultaneously “endeavours to arrange and methodise all its ideas.” Through observing and categorizing reality, “the mind” disciplined itself. “The mind” created divisions outside of and inside of itself. Through observation, “the mind” engaged in disciplining reality and self-disciplining itself. The mind disciplined a particular object by grouping it with similar objects. When an individual observed similarities between objects, particulars vanished into a generalized universal, “one common class.” All particulars generalized within “one common class,” Smith asserted, are called “by one general name.” In this formulation, an individual established the identity of an object through the observation of similarities and differences. An object’s identity became fixed, unchangeable, and distinct. The divisions and boundaries that separated one class of objects from another class could not be penetrated. Through a search for generalizable similarities, unique, particular, differences vanished.
Smith’s publishers, Joseph Black and James Hutton, used his description of knowledge production to organize Essays on Philosophical Subjects, which includes The History of Astronomy. Black and Hutton published The History of Astronomy in 1795, five years after Smith’s death. Black and Hutton said Smith gave many manuscripts to them before his death. They inspected his manuscripts and searched for similarities, for a “happy connection.” After inspecting Smith’s manuscripts, they decided,
[T]he greater number of them appeared to be parts of a plan he once had formed, for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts. … His friends are persuaded however, that the reader will find in them that happy connection, that full and accurate expression, and that clear illustration which are conspicuous in the rest of his works; and that though it is difficult to add much to the great fame he so justly acquired by his other writings, these will be read with satisfaction and pleasure.
Smith’s editors searched for similarities, “the greater number of them appeared to be parts of a plan.” The editors did not allude to the lesser number of essays that they excluded from the manuscript they created and titled Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Similar content connected the essays. The editors asserted that the essays they assembled form a “connected history of the liberal sciences and the elegant arts.” The editors claimed that all readers should share their views and “find in them that happy connection.” Their prose suggested that the species of knowledge that they assembled was universal. It should provide an enjoyable experience to all individuals, subsumed within a general, universal category, “the reader.” Their claim of a strong “happy connection” erases particularities within the category “reader.” They assumed a “happy connection” similar to the “happy connection” they claimed connected each essay, would connect all readers. They assured “the reader” that reading the collection of essays would incite sensations of “satisfaction and pleasure.” During the eighteenth century, members of the emergent bourgeoisie viewed both producing and acquiring knowledge as pleasurable exercises.
Eighteenth-century literary critics within the bourgeois public sphere “rationally” applied Smith’s theme of knowledge production to “the novel.” The novel emerged as a new literary form in Europe during the mid-eighteenth century. It emerged at this moment because of the combination of print capitalism and an increase in bourgeois wealth. Industrial and imperialist exploitation were the two main sources for the bourgeoisie’s increase in wealth. Critics attempted to create a stable, homogenous literary genre called, “the novel.” In addition, writers attempted to self-reflectively position their “novels” within this category. Many “novels” propagated Smith’s ideas of knowledge production and categorization to a larger audience and contributed to the spread of a disciplinary society populated by self-disciplining individuals.
Winkfield’s The Female American (1767) slyly played with and mimicked “the novel.” The text received only two brief reviews. It appears to have shocked at least two critics. One critic wrote the text was “full of wonders; and well calculated to make one sort of readers stare.” This sentence created a category, “one sort,” within a category, “readers.” The sentence, unlike Smith’s editors, did not posit a universal category, “reader.” Nevertheless, the sentence could be straight from Smith’s History of Astronomy. For Smith, the sensation of wonder preceded both surprise and admiration. All three sensations were related and depended upon an object of reference. The “wonders” that “make one sort of readers stare” follows Smith’s definition of “Wonder.” Smith wrote,
It is this fluctuation and vain recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the spirits that they excite, which constitute the sentiment properly called Wonder, and which occasion that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourselves and others, when wondering at some new object, and which are the natural symptoms of uncertain and undetermined thought.
The above fragment succinctly describes The Female American. The text was composed of Unca’s “vain recollection[s].” Throughout the text she experienced “the emotion or movement of the spirits” consisting of fear, excitement, terror, sickness, happiness, and anger. Unca, the narrator, realized that her text and adventures might appear “uncommon” and perhaps excite “wonder.”
Unca suggested her text was a “form of an history; for which purpose I collected together such loose memorandums as I had occasionally made….” Unca assembled her text, in a manner similar to Smith’s editors who assembled Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Both Unca and Smith’s editors searched for “happy connection[s]” between fragments. Unca tried to position her text within the emerging genre of “the novel.” She wrote, “I think the greatest sceptic will allow, uncommon as they are [her experiences and adventures], that they do not exceed the bounds of probability. Here are two ends they cannot fail of answering, rational entertainment, and mental improvement.” Unca positioned her text as a pleasurable product of knowledge production and consumption. Critics attempted to discipline her text, her text tried to discipline readers, and readers, thanks to the interventions of critics and text might attempt to self-discipline themselves.
The problem of category haunted The Female American. Unca defied categorization. She was the daughter of an English imperialist and Amerindian princess. The sexual relationship between Unca’s parents appeared consensual. Unca did not portray herself as the product of a vicious, violent English penetration into a virgin continent. She saw herself as a hybrid figure: half English, half American.
My tawny complexion, and the oddity of my dress, attracted every one’s attention, for my mother used to dress me in a kind of mixed habit, neither perfectly Indian, nor yet in the European taste, either of fine linen, or a rich silk. I never wore a cap; but my lank black hair was adorned with diamonds and flowers. … My arms were also adorned with strings of diamonds, and one of the same kind surrounded my waist. I frequently diverted myself with wearing the bow and arrow the queen my aunt left me, and was so dexterous a shooter, that when very young, I could shoot a bird on the wing.
Unca dressed in a “mixed habit” and defied categorization. Perhaps her appearance incited the sentiments of wonder, surprise, and admiration within observers. Although Unca celebrated her “mixed habit” she decided to stay in the Americas at the end of the text. The title, The Female American erased “English,” and seemed to foreshadow her decision.
After the captain stole Unca’s ship and abandoned her with her clothes and bow on an “uninhabited island,” somewhere in the Caribbean, she behaved like an English imperialist. She wandered and rambled throughout the island. She appropriated a temple and occupied a stone room. She stole Amerindian gold and treasure. She later shipped the loot to her bourgeois family members in England. She categorized the wildlife and foliage. “I soon tasted some of each sort [various shell-fish], and found them very delicious; particularly a shell-fish, like what are called oysters in England, and which needed no dressing.” One animal, encountered at the beginning of “Volume II,” defied Unca’s classifying, imperialist mind. The sight of the animal shocked Unca, “Of the four-footed animals I saw one of a most extraordinary kind. It was the size of a large dog, as to its body, but its legs, which were very long, were by no means proportioned to the bulk of this strange animal, being so slender as to bend under him, insomuch that it could only move with the utmost slowness.” She attempted to place the “strange animal” in a familiar category, “large dog.” However, that category could not contain the “strange animal.” The sight of the “strange animal” incited wonder within Unca’s mind, “I wondered within myself how this creature could either defend, or provide for itself; but observing it more closely, I, took notice that its eyes were uncommonly large, for an animal of that size…. …The mouth was no less dreadful…which showed two horrid rows of sharp, but short teeth.” Initially, the strange animal caused Unca to experience sensations of disbelief and disorientation, “I wondered within myself.” However, like a good English imperialist, disciplined by Smith’s scheme of knowledge production, Unca subjected the creature to further scrutiny, “but observing it more closely.” Unca concluded her account of “the strange animal” with a description of a vicious, carnivorous, blood-soaked orgy. The “strange animal” laid still. A “great number of field-mice” approached. The field mice began to “nibble” at the animal’s thick, long tuffs of hair. Then, to Unca’s “great astonishment,” the animal “turned his head, and devoured them very greedily, one after another. I dare say that in a few minutes, he ate near three hundred of them.” The “strange animal” could function as a metaphor for English imperialism, violent and destructive. Alternatively, the “strange animal” may be a joke on the bourgeois philosopher who foolishly believes he can categorize, order, and totally “know” his world. Or, perhaps, the “strange animal” symbolized Unca, who perched in the great idol and attracted a great number of “the Indians.” However, “the Indians” survived until the end of the text. Perhaps, Unca and her husband slaughtered “the Indians” sometime in the future. Nonetheless, The Female American demonstrated the ubiquity of Smith’s knowledge production schema in eighteenth-century England.
Smith’s suggestion that knowledge production entailed the grouping of similar objects within generalizable categories became an epistemological imperative throughout all of Europe and Europe’s imperialist holdings. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European imperialists traversed the globe in search of wealth, sex, and adventure. They brought their disciplinary systems with them wherever they went. For instance, nineteenth-century European imperialists introduced censuses modeled upon Smith’s scheme of knowledge production to South East Asia. Censuses stabilized fluid categories for the purposes of counting, sorting, deploying, and planning population. Censuses are relics of a mid- to late-nineteenth-century transition from disciplinary power toward biopower. Censuses massified unique individuals into a series of exchangeable elements. Then the “classifying mind of the colonial state” fantasized about placing the exchangeable elements into generalizable and distinct categories, such as “Malaysian,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” and “Other.” Benedict Anderson suggests a census,
[T]ried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining. Given the exclusive nature of the classificatory system, and the logic of quantification itself, a “Cochin-Chinese” had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable “Cochin-Chinese”—within, of course, the state’s domain.
Through censuses, imperialist regimes created categories that appeared internally homogenous. Censuses applied Smith’s knowledge production scheme to people. Censuses transferred Smith’s knowledge production scheme to governmentality. Censuses transformed unique individuals into a “series of replicable” and exchangeable parts that formed a generalizable category. At the same time censuses created generalizable categories, they created individuals who could be replicated, exchanged, categorized, and classified “in an aggregable series.”
Smith’s knowledge production scheme even infiltrated the developing academic discipline of History. The first European academic chairs in History began to sprout during the early nineteenth century—1810 at the University of Berlin and 1812 at the Sorbonne. The discipline of History viewed time serially and diachronically. Time in historical narratives proceeded linearly and sequentially. Historical narratives posited a “serial view of social causality.” Anderson suggests, “[T]his sense of the world [“serial view of social causality”] was now speedily deepening its grip on Western imaginations.” Smith’s phrases “train of things” and “chain of … events” explored the seriality of social casualty. A connection of succession associated two object that appeared unlike, but “have often been observed to follow each other, and have constantly presented themselves to the senses in that order, they come to be so connected together in the fancy, that the idea of the one seems, of its own accord, to call up and introduce that of the other.” This formulation is one of the roots of causality within historical narratives.
Within the observer’s imagination, two distinct objects of study are associated with each other through order and temporality of appearance.
They fall in with the natural career of the imagination; and as the ideas which represented such a train of things would seem all mutually to introduce each other, every last thought to be called up by the foregoing, and to call up the succeeding; so when the objects themselves occur, every last event seems, in the same manner, to be introduced by the foregoing, and to introduce the succeeding. There is no break, no stop, no gap, no interval. The ideas excited by so coherent a chain of things seem, as it were, to float through the mind of their own accord, without obliging it to exert itself, or to make any effort in order to pass from one of them to another.
The above fragment introduced themes that dominated the writing of Euro-American, liberal, bourgeois history for the next two hundred years. Historical narratives, influenced by Smith, appeared as cohesive consensuses, a “coherent chain of things,” that progressed linearly through “homogenous, empty time.” A historical narrative influenced by Smith, traversed through time like a giant river, constantly flowing forward toward its end, its definitive conclusion. Events unfolded logically. Past events led to present events, present events led to future events. These narratives did not represent surprises and accidents. Everything appeared as a “coherent chain of things.” Historical narratives written in this manner are dangerous. The narratives supported the power structures in which they were created. “History is the discourse of power, the discourse of the obligations power uses to subjugate; it is also the dazzling discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize, and immobilize,” writes Foucault. Historical narratives influenced by Smith’s ideas did not allow for the envisioning of alternative possibilities or alternative realities. They argued that the condition of the “present” was the result of logical, inevitable “progress” from the “past.”
Michel Foucault offers an escape from linear, cohesive historical narratives that progress toward the present. Foucault argues that historical narratives are discourses of power; they are weapons of power. Historical narratives subjugate, exclude, and marginalize individuals who do not fit neatly into a cohesive, linear narrative. Those individuals and their ideas are forgotten and erased from history. Foucault suggests that historians who use a genealogical methodology can resurrect forgotten individuals and knowledges. Most often, inspiration from these forgotten individuals and knowledges help people envision alternative power structures. Foucault writes,
Compared to the attempt to inscribe knowledges in the power-hierarchy typical of science, genealogy is, then, a sort of attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse. The project of these disorderly and tattered genealogies is to reactivate local knowledges—Deleuze would no doubt call them “minor”—against the scientific hierarchizalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects.
The fragment articulates Foucault’s historical methodology. Foucault suggests that historians should look for successful and failed challenges to power, examine institutions that appear inevitable, and search for knowledges that appear marginalized, forgotten, and subjugated in the present. Foucault teaches historians to focus their investigations upon how power operates—its tactics and strategies—and power’s “extremities, at where its exercise became less and less juridical.”
Foucault challenges historians to reconceptualize power. Power for Foucault does not emanate from one central point; it is not fixed or stable. On the contrary, power is “something that circulates, or rather as something that functions only when it is part of a chain.” Foucault continues, “Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. …power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.” Foucault’s description of power, could be Smith’s description of knowledge production. Both circulate, function in networks and chains, pass through bodies, and subjugate and empower people. Smith’s influence is overwhelming. Even theorists who wish to criticize the processes of Enlightenment knowledge production Smith epitomizes fall prey to his logic.
The Internet propels Smith’s scheme of knowledge production into hyper-speed. The Internet and infotechnological communication accelerates temporality and erases geospace before our eyes. Paul Virilio writes, “[W]ith the decline of the nation-state and the discrete revival in new forms of politics by the media, by the multi-media constituted by these networks and screens which show us the acceleration of time.” For the approximately seventy million planetary Internet “users”, local time becomes global time, local space becomes cyberspace. Internet users, members of a “techno-cult” instantly travel the planet through the click of a mouse and stroke of a key. They become connected to machines. Experience becomes mechanical. Knowledge becomes virtual. Unlike, in the eighteenth-century, members of the twenty-first-century techno-cult do not acquire knowledge through visual, direct observation. Instead, they acquire knowledge through technological mediation, virtual observation of a “real.” The methodology of knowledge acquisition has changed. The categorization, classification, and organization stays somewhat the same. Twentieth-first-century categories, unlike eighteenth-century categories, appear mutable, changeable, fluid, and permeable. The appearances of categories change through infotechnological mediation. Thanks to the increasing speed of knowledge creation and knowledge circulation, no knowledge, no category, no organization of knowledge appears stable. The speed of knowledge circulation questions the feasibility of categorization. Disciplines blur. Academic bandits prowl disciplinary borderlands. Cutting-edge knowledge appears under the guise of interdisciplinarity—perhaps a better term is superdisciplinarity.
The Encyclopedia of Life is a prime example of collaborative, superdisciplinary knowledge production. Construction of the Encyclopedia unites biologists, botanists, zoologists, linguists, and “species and computer software experts from across the world.” The production of the Encyclopedia erases geospace between academic experts. Dr. James Edwards, the director of the Encyclopedia, gushes, “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time. … Through collaboration, we all can increase our appreciation of the immense variety of life, the challenges to it, and ways to conserve biodiversity.” The consumption of the Encyclopedia shall erase geospace between content and user. Members of the techno-cult rejoice: instantaneous accessibility of “valuable” information from everywhere and anywhere upon the planet.
The Encyclopedia’s creators envision that the complete encyclopedia shall contain information on all 1.8 million of the planet’s living organisms. Users—“scientists, policy makers, students and public”—shall use this information to “discover and protect the wonders of the planet and encourage learning and conservation.” Users, members of the techno-cult, shall discover and know the “planet” through technological mediation. Users shall know the planet through categories dictated by the Encyclopedia’s creators. The hyperlinked encyclopedia shall not erase the hierarchicalization of knowledge, the power of knowledge. Information presented in the Encyclopedia shall “be gathered and vetted by experts before appearing on the website.” However, the experts shall reserve a “a special section” for “citizen scientists” to share their observations of “the natural world.”
Planetary warming and multifront planetary warfare endanger the planet’s 1.8 billion living organisms. The Encyclopedia categorizes, classifies, and “will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level.” Technological advances allow for the Encyclopedia’s creation. Edwards argues, “advances in technology for searching, annotating, and visualizing information now permit us, indeed mandate us to build the Encyclopedia of Life.” Technology enables and demands knowledge production and consumption. The Encyclopedia of Life’s cyber-location is critical. Only the Internet shall survive the impending devastation of planetary war and warming. When the 1.8 million organisms perish, the Encyclopedia of Life, floating in the ether of the cyberworld shall contain the necessary information to recreate and resurrect the dead. Of course, an “integral accident,” or the dropping of an “information bomb” could destroy the Encyclopedia of Life and all the hyperlinked “knowledge” it contains.
Users of the Encyclopedia of Life do not perform the same self-disciplinary exercises as Smith’s eighteenth-century readers. Twenty-first-century users navigate instantaneously and simultaneously through a hyperlinked virtual reality. The Encyclopedia’s categories discipline its users’ perceptions of planetary “reality.” The users’ interaction with hyperlinked virtual reality blurs identity, encourages individual identity mutation, and destroys individual, particular, local categories. Users are no longer men, women, and children of the nation state. Users are planetary men, women, and children. As the Encyclopedia works to maintain biological classification and categorization, it shall erode the divisions of nation states. The Encyclopedia shall usher in an age of universal, planetary identity—planetary, techno-cult conformity.
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