![]() ![]() K nowledge, frames, structures of Feelingġ.1 What do I understand by ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’? And what is the function of us intellectuals as their bearers? Let us start from our dire class situation, where most of us live by our work, that is to say are objectively a part of the working people against whom a more and more stringent class war from above is being waged by our rulers, capitalists and their henchmen. However, it needs to remain an abbreviated overview for who’s fleshing out, I must regretfully often refer to other works of mine (based upon insights by many other people).ġ. I trust this can be done without falling into a vicious epistemic circle. I shall, here, concentrate on a few categories needed for understanding or cognition, which, in my case – since I explicitly claim that the ideal horizon and cases of SF and utopia/nism are cognitive – means that I wish to understand cognition or cognise understanding. The rest is situational wisdom, what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, an intuitive flair for the situation in the text (on the author’s side) and of the book (on the reader’s side). How does one pick the categories needed for understanding? They must not be too many – to my mind, using more than circa five main categories confuses the memory of reader and writer alike – and it would be economical if they reinforced one other. These nodes are mostly, as Jameson put it, ‘formal peculiarities of … narratives’, 1 with all the rich thickness of artistic cognition, which then may, in a preface or conclusion (or indeed a loyal review), be thinned down to the ideational or notional skeleton indispensable for an overview. But their being teased out and understood by a reader also ought to illuminate the main nodes of the text, making it richer and clearer. (Once and for all, I do not mean that categories must be explicitly presented as a system anywhere in such a text, though many texts that owe allegiance to scholarship or systematised knowledge may do so.) Categories are, up to a point and perhaps obliquely, always present in a text. Looking at the essay-chapters of that book of mine (still seeking a publisher), Disputing the Deluge, I wondered what makes them part of the same argument, that is, how do the various parts and levels of a longer text feed back into and reinforce one other? Inevitably, through categories illuminating and, one hopes, largely justifying the whole. It attempts to fuse a reflection on how we understand what we think we understand (which in humanities or arts one calls texts, whether musical, pictorial or verbal…) with an emancipatory political stance that leads to focussing on contradictions and splits in meaning and the body politic. Mark Herman, 1996)įor a forthcoming book of mine dealing with science fiction (SF) and utopia/nism, I opted for an approach that I call political epistemology. When no hope is left, one has to follow one’s principles. The catastrophe is that things just go on as before. Why did the heathens tremble and the peoples imagine inanities? ![]()
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