In Praise of Monsters

“We are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially.”ii

In the above quote, Bruno Latour muses on the tension between two ways of relating to information, which he calls “purification” and “translation.” Purification is the separation and specialization of knowledge. It distills, reduces and creates partitions, separating knowledge into distinct and exclusive realms.

Translation is hybrid and continuous knowledge, stitching together disparate fields and perspectives into networks.

Purification is the acknowledged project of modernity, and it is what generally passes for knowledge in the contemporary world. We go to scientists and mathematicians for facts, priests and philosophers for morality, artists and sociologists for a critical examination of the discourse itself. Generally, the more purified information is, the more “true” it feels to the modern person.

Hybrid knowledge on the other hand feels “uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly”: think creationist museums, a doctor doing energy healing, a politician admitting uncertainty. It is taboo to cross the lines, we are uneasy with these monsters.

I’ve always been a fan of monsters.

That which is taboo is also very powerful. Hybrids are generative and transformative, they produce mutations – new forms of knowledge. This is vital.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the tension between specialized and hybrid knowledge, especially with the impact of information technology on our evolving relationship to knowledge. As information becomes more intimately and exponentially available, how are our knowledge practices changing? And what is possible?

The internet is a monster-generating hybrid network if ever there was one.

Any given search term will return a dazzling compound-eye’s view, a pixilated holograph gradually emerging in a grotesque and unsettled whole. There is obviously tremendous power here, a potentially iconoclastic democratization of power/knowledge. iii

Yet what I observe and what I practice in navigating information is an ever-increasing practice of purification. My google results target my geographic location, web browsing history and the content of the emails I write. In parallel, I rarely look beyond the first page of results. I get my news filtered through a silo of like-minded facebook friends or twitter users. Increasingly, what passes for news is anonymously data-mined clusters of information presented without context or analysis.iv I can in most cases avoid any interaction with information that is uncanny, uncomfortable, or annoying. As a result I exist more and more in a self-confirming knowledge-universe, like piled upon like, a cinching tautological noose of specialized information.

Of course in all this neatly curated purification, monsters proliferate. I mix my own lazy cocktail of nature and culture that confirms my beliefs about where the two lie.

What is not happening is the skillful practice of translation.

I believe that more than ever, there is a need for the art of creating monsters to be acknowledged and nurtured as a discipline – doing the important work of shuttling between perspectives and sources. Transdisciplinary understanding, critical dexterity and dialectical reasoning are vital skills to develop. If we let corporate entities do this work for us, defining which boundaries are enforced (trade ≠ ethics) and which monsters are okay (Islam = danger), then the monsters are being created by economic forces that will do to knowledge what Monsanto has done to our food supply.

I propose that this is what Latour means by officially representing the existence of monsters. It is not a shift or “return” to hybrid network thinking, but the recognition that both translation and purification are happening, and the more skilled and intelligent we are with the simultaneous practice of both, the better. But to be skillful with hybrid knowledge involves operating in the shifting realm between cause and effect, nature and nurture, us and them, immanence and transcendence – and not to hang there suspended in the “unfinished skepticism” of postmodernity. It is to commit fully as actors in the unfinished project.

Imagine a conversation, say, about the Alberta oil sands, or the Montreal student protests, that simultaneously and lucidly weaves technological facts, ecological and sociological data, history, questions of morality, national myths, an examination of race, class and power politics, personal exhortations, and a deconstruction of the language and media used to represent the issue.

This hybrid discourse is willing to explore the tensions of coexisting yet contradictory truths. It is a conversation without conclusions. I believe it is a conversation that is needed. And even more needed are citizens who can/will have it.

This is what this blog is about.