Reified, identitarian sandcastle thinking, despite its great achievements, increasingly finds itself beached on a field of complexity that it cannot adequately explain. But the even more interesting question is how, nevertheless, we do produce useful knowledge, against all the odds. It is not natural for nature to be known’ (2002: 9). For there is no small mischievous pleasure in reading Nietzsche describe ‘how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature’ (1976: 42) or Foucault proclaiming from atop Nietzsche’s shoulders that ‘There is nothing in knowledge that enables it, by any right whatever, to know this world. In my first post I wrote about this essentially obvious, but nevertheless important speculative disjunct of knowledge. But to focus myopically on them alone is to ignore the vast stretch of processes – constructions, destructions, reconstructions – of which the sandcastles are snapshots, reifications. These sandcastles are, somewhat miraculously, immensely useful. Upon this beach sandcastles are built, from small bucket-shaped identities to intricately sculpted polylithic theories, and in between a cacophony of crumbling typologies and classifications. Beleaguered and bedraggled, a tired king enthroned on a bustling beach, the inexorable oceans of uncertainty lap at his feet, a cohort of desperate subjects, bent on knowledge, imploring him (against his Canutian piety – he knows the Sisyphusean nature of the task) to hold back the tide. In this gap between detail and abstraction, between reality and knowledge, sits epistemology. Slowly – sadly – the narrator comes to realise that, ‘In the overly replete world of Funes’, as in the great coincident map of that great Empire, ‘there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details,’ and that as such thought as we know it had become impossible (ibid). In another story Borges’ narrator encounters Ireneo Funes who, following brain trauma, gains infinitely infallible perception and memory, thereby forgetting how to forget. For, ‘to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract’ (Borges 1993: 90). This useless map was quickly forgotten, left to fade in the glaring deserts, its dusty remnants an Ozymandian warning against pretentions of a coincident match between reality and the necessarily incomplete models of thought. In one of Jorge Luis Borges’ shortest short stories, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, he charts the impossible futility of a perfect science, exemplified by a cartophilic Empire, whose ‘Unconscionable Maps’ grew in accuracy and size until, finally, ‘the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’ (Borges 2000: 181). I wouldn’t say it offered me any certainty (what else do you expect by now?), but it did help me begin to grasp dialectics in all its limited, contradictory glory. Maybe the extravagant metaphors can make up for it a little. It’s an expansion of a short peripheral piece I had to write for my PhD, so please excuse all the footnotes and the Harvard referencing. This is my first remotely systematic attempt to reckon with Marx’s dialectical method and social science epistemology.
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