We need a “sensuous knowledge”, in Minna Salami’s words, to save the planet. And there are many seeking to characterise it

From the Advaya course, “Sensuous Knowledge”

We have been working with the concept of Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge for a while now - even more concentratedly since her Advaya course on the subject (based on her book of the same name).

Some paragraphs below from that, which captures the idea:

“The idea that calculable reasoning is the only worthy way to explain reality is one of the most dangerous ideas ever proposed.”

When I wrote the above words in my book, Sensuous Knowledge, it was not without some nervousness. The book was a criticism of the technical, materialist and rationalist attitude to conventional knowledge that dominates our thinking politically, socially, intellectually, and emotionally.

And despite that I have a long professional background researching and writing about these and related topics, it did not escape my mind that my argument could, in many professional circles to which I belong, make me the subject of ridicule.

I knew that to criticise the pervasive equating of the scientific method, of reason, of deduction, of rationalisation, of methodic measuring with knowledge per se, and to do so as a woman and an African was to invite accusations of being uninformed. Or worse, to be accused myself of promulgating dangerous opinions.

But writing the book has made me even more convinced that the dominant knowledge paradigm, and its obsession with quantification, is detrimental to our individual, collective and environmental well-being. I have no qualms whatsoever in stating these words anymore…it’s important to understand their implications and to express them boldly.

…In order to transform social reality, we must transform what, why, and how we know.

The conventional and dominant approach to knowledge production that shapes the underlying thought patterns of our societies has made us confused and detached from reality.

Subsequently, we are detached from each other, from the nonhuman natural world, as well as from our own inner experiences that we find ourselves in a state of systemic confusion and crisis, oppression and injustice. It’s more important than ever to continue to forefront this criticism and to explore new ways of being in the world.

We very much invite you to explore Minna’s new frameworks, with her website as the initial route-map. (We’d also draw your attention to her startling September essay on “Desire”, for The Philosopher). But Minna came into our minds as we read this blurb from the Australian media theorist Sean Cubitt, promoting his new book Truth: Aesthetic Politics (on Goldsmiths/MIT Press):

The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they don't trust the media but that they trust them too much. White supremacists are absolutely convinced by their supremacy. They distrust technologies and climate change as much as the global poor because, as white Europeans, they believe they are exempt from exploitation.

This book argues that the only truths possible in the 21st century are mobile, inventive practices involving everything European models of communication exclude: technologies, nature, and leftover humanity.

Tracing histories of their separation, Truth analyzes the struggle between the new dominance of information systems and the sensory worlds it excludes, not least the ancestral wisdom that the West has imprisoned in its technologies.

The emergent cybernetics of the 1940s has become the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Truth opposes its division of the world between subjects and objects, signals and noise, emphasizing that there can be no return to some primal Eden of unfettered exchange.

Instead, these divisions, which have fundamentally reorganized the commodity form that they inherited, are the historical conditions we must confront.

Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic practices, from literature, film, art, music, workplace media, scientific instruments, and animal displays, Truth seeks out ways to create a new commons and a new politics - grounded in aesthetic properties of creativity, senses and perception that can no longer be restricted to humans alone.

More here. It’s interesting how Cupitt’s awareness of the “ancestral”, “sensory worlds” excluded by our current systems of thought find an echo in Salami’s critique of “Euro-patriarchal knowledge” - yet the sex-gender dimension seems to be missing in Cupitt (at least from the blurb). And what is the difference between regarding technology as implying “no return to some primal Eden of unfettered exchange” (Cupitt) and Salami’s resistance to “technical, materialist and rationalist attitude to conventional knowledge”?

There’s a blog coming up later this week featuring Jeremy Rifkin’s new book Age of Resilience - where he believes the most radical change we can make is in our idea of humanity as profoundly biological and nature-connected (than isolated and mechanistic).

What we see and know determines how we will act. A sensuous knowledge, aimed a planet-friendly action, is being advanced on, by many interested parties.