Here is One Hand: Knowledge 2.0

March 22nd, 2008 Fred McVittie Posted in Blog, Grasp, Knowledge, Sense, thesis |

“If you do know that ‘here is one hand’ we’ll grant you all the rest.”

One of the most common way in which artefacts of knowledge are organised and are distinguished one from another is through their designation as either Objective or Subjective. This distinction is accompanied by a range of value judgments and use-specific assumptions which serve to reinforce these categories as distinct and, for the most part, unproblematic. Whilst there is no overt or obvious difference in the intrinsic value of one or other of these types of knowing, it is fundamental within the empirical sciences that only Objective knowledge is permissible, largely because of the inherent difficulties of finding effective ways to mobilise knowledge located only in the Subject. This systematic tendency to acknowledge Objectivity and ignore Subjectivity is also found outside of the hard sciences and, despite some understandable but misguided resistance, forms the foundations for procedures of knowledge authentication in the arts and humanities.

One way of comprehending this distinction is through an analysis of the language games which are used in the explication of these two, apparently distinct, knowledge forms. Within the discourses of each form different metaphors, metonyms, and image schema structure the relevant concepts and there is a coherent and consistent pattern is which metaphors and schema are used. Objective knowledge makes extensive use of metaphors related to the act of seeing, including the entailments of visual awareness such as the presence of light, the placement of the object of knowledge in an external space etc. Subjective knowledge, on the other hand, is much more likely to make use of metaphors related to taste or smell. Again, the entailments associated with this latter metaphorical understanding support the conceptualisation associated with subjectivity; interiority, unilateral experiencing, ‘closeness’ to the core self of the experiencer.

It can be argued that between these two extremes of seeing and tasting, and the binary division in knowledge which they suggest, is a zone of possible metaphorical engagement based on the haptic sense; the reaching, touching, stroking, and caressing of the human hand. Knowledge constructed around the metaphor of the hand allows the object of such knowledge to be either grasped or rebuffed. Haptic knowing allows for both the claiming and possession of information (forsaking all others) that subjects require, but also the open-handedness and baton-passing that marks the public-spirited scientist. It might further be suggested that the technological circumstances for such tactile empiricism is already with us in the form of Web 2.0, the collection of database-driven, interactive, user-generated web environments characterised by MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Amazon, and Wikipedia. The knowledge present on such sites is always in flux and ranges from personal reflection and comment to the most rigorously researched outcomes of the scientific method. The key feature of this network of knowledge, though, is the open access means of its creation and management. Whilst the ‘official’ status of a site such as Wikipedia in conventional academic circles may be questionable, there is no arguing that the information available is proudly and sensuously ‘hands-on’, crafted and moulded by the combined efforts of the end-users. Such sites are paradigmatic examples of haptic knowledge, and will provide instantiations of how we might come to know in ways which bypass both the eye and the tongue.