The Cultural Commons and Small Talk Part3: Partial Knowledge/Fragments and Fear. by Yohei
this is a new entry in an ongoing Open exploration of the cultural commons.
So true: At its best, partial knowledge is the starting point from which more large scale patterns are initially hypothesized. It elicts curiosity and mobilizes interpretive effort.
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John Ruskin as a child, before the aesthetic, geographical, and architectural theories that come later, grew up in a cold house- David Copperfield cold. Well, that’s how I imagine it. Patterns and rugs, once again…
Anyhow:
“Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in a toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. …[I] could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet: — examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in opposite houses… But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet.” John Ruskin, Praeterita
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Ruskin’s childhood patterns are idealistically complete, so total in fact that flaws — as in Northcote’s carpet — stand out as abnormalities.
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Two weeks ago, New Yorkers were told that city and national officials had credible information that a bombing would occur somewhere in the subway system in the next few days. A specific time and place was supposedly known but not announced: we, of course, had to go to work as usual.
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Partial knowledge is the way to cause fear in mice in behavioral experiments (through electric shocks on an unpreventable, random, and irregular schedule) yet it is also the same way to run a city: terror and counterterrorism both rely on the same strategy.
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The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing, Feb. 12, 2002
From The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld
October 28th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
god, donald’s poetry is amazing. he should do readings. i’d go. maybe i’d even bring a bongo, who knows.
seriously though, this poesy bit of his does make me like him more. i feel like he and i are grappling with similar questions from our very different perspectives in this ol’ power geometry of ours. what about those things we don’t even know we don’t know, eh donald?
what about that moment of laughing amazed at the feeling of a cliche suddenly becoming real and true for you. Of feeling, for just a second, the edges of that enormity of unknowns that is the exciting and uncontrollable and awesome stuff of life brush up against you while you learn something new and it becomes, satisfyingly, a piece of the ‘known’.
Like the cliche: time heals all wounds. i remember my shock and frustration at discovering that pain would actually, gradually dull and numb over time. Or how about: sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me. i know that that phrase made me irritated and angry until i had to laughingly acknowledge that names really did have no material impact on my real world day to day. so strange to accept that people i knew, and who had some idea of me i didn’t like, could exist for me in an entirely different world if I just allowed myself to walk away unscathed.
entoutcas. i’m bluthering. i guess i’m just trying to jumpstart my memory of those moments when i gained a new perspective on the pattern.
donald sees a whole other pattern, one with more secrets and more violence and more cruelty and more lives at stake and i image that makes those kinds of mental walkaways kind of tough to contemplate. i imagine you get to feel as though you have been chosen to bear the weight of all the power and bad stuff in the world as you’re looking into this abyss it is not just looking back at you but, surruptitiously, magnetically reorienting you. not a job i’d choose.
October 28th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Heh. Well, Rummy does end with that non-place, unknown unknowns. What’s also interesting, to add to your thoughts, is that although he means unknown unknowns to be both an epistemelogical and ontological vaccum — it has no status as something in terms of knowledge and existence — his category raises some questions.
If one were to think this through in a speech-act kind of way, saying you don’t know something can be considered a performative utterance: just by saying it (or thinking or writing it) you now know of it’s existence. In an incredible way, the very declaration of its nonexistence brings it into being. Sort of like this famous example: a university president announcing “our doors are now open to [hitherto excluded group]” becomes more than just speech. It ripples through ‘the real world.’ Its validity converges at the moment of speech, when the mechanisms that have allowed that utterance to be possible at all (say, a change in admissions policy) and its future validity (that the public now knows about it) meet.
At the same time, how much value do we place in acknowledging the possibility of unknown unknowns? At most, its a tentative border drawn around a big empty nothingness. In military intelligence terms, maybe it would be something like, “the total of all strategies of groups we don’t know about, that we can imagine to be possible.” So what you have is nothing becoming something which become infinity (as in an mathematically sublime and unmanageable amount of possibility), that functions almost like nothing. Square one.
But of course, as you points out, what might be scary for Donald is kind of exciting for most of us. It’s amazing to suddenly hear a band you know absolutely nothing about, rather than (and this is reverse vicariousness again), one you don’t really listen to but “know of.”
November 7th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
yeah, the unknown becomes exhilirating when you feel that somehow it could be good. music reminds us of the masses of potential messages and feelings obscured by the fearful blinkered binaries which get brought down around our eyes by the threat of violence.