<nettime> The Commodification of Ignorance

Extracts from talk at Haus der Elektronischen Künste (HeK) Basel

“Commodifying Ignorance”

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.” (Internal memo of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company. 1969)

Abstract

Confected doubt - commodified ignorance - manufactured controversy - post-truth - false-flag - alternative facts - junk-data – These morbid symptoms of a deeper epistemic crisis are not simply a phenomenon of the internet. They are the unintended consequence of moving knowledge to the centre of what we take democratic politics to be. The politicisation of knowledge has unwittingly empowered knowledge’s dark sibling, ignorance. Not ignorance as blank space, but ignorance as a deliberately crafted commodity. And a force to be reckoned with.

1. epistemic/anti-epistemic -

In 2017 *How Much of This is Fiction* was an exhibition featuring artists as tricksters using tactics of simulation, deception, and subterfuge for nominally progressive ends. For example, the artist Ian Alan Paul staged a representation of ‘The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History’ as if such a museum actually existed and occupied the current site of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre (like the Robben Island Museum, Cape Town). This kind of conceit or thought experiment used fiction as a method to allow the curators and artists to flesh out this imaginary space in enough detail to trigger the imagination of visitors.

But one of the artists, Paolo Cirio, took issue with the exhibition’s curatorial premise, arguing that he was advocating the very opposite of fiction, instead he was foregrounding fact, data, computation, evidence and above all ‘truth telling’.

Cirio had already introduced the term Evidentiary Realism to capture the emergence of a wider 21^st century realist movement. More recently this approach has been further developed by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weisman under the rubric of ‘Investigative Aesthetics’ in a book of the same name, in which the authors represent the likes of Forensic Architecture and others as an ‘epistemic’ movement operating in opposition to the anti-epistemic (their term) background conditions facilitating the rise of reactionary populists typified by the likes of Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Orban, Putin et al.

I want to push back on the epistemic/anti-epistemic binary. All populism, reactionary or otherwise, is also an epistêmê. But one based on the knowledge-claim that it is they who ‘know’ the authentic will of the people. There is thus an inadvertent complicity underlying the (phoney) war between technocracy and populism. Anyone who doubts this need look no further than the empty spectacle of the contest between Le Pen and Macron.

2. Artificial Stupidity -

The lure of the technocratic in both art and politics is that it appears to offer itself as a bulwark against populism. There are however non-populist alternatives to the rise of a technocratic art. One such avenue is suggested by the work of the artist Micheal O’Connell (aka Mockism) who has written of his encounter with Margaret Boden, an eminent Professor of cognitive science who, after a lecture on the dangers of AI, inquired of O’Connell as to the subject of his PhD to which he replied ‘artificial stupidity’. Its an answer that reflects O’Connell’s wider practice of intervening in the virtual public sphere in ways that illuminate the dysfunctionality of many supposedly intelligent or ‘smart’ systems [..] His term ‘Artificial Stupidity’ acts as a shorthand for lack of general awareness or inability to think about all ‘embracing systems”. O’Connell’s work is one example that suggests an emerging curatorial space that goes beyond the visual rhetoric of incontrovertibility. And seeks instead to dramatize and articulate the “contours, scope and structure of our ignorance”.

The ‘epistemic turn’ in both art and politics has had the unintended consequence of weaponizing ignorance. Not ignorance as a void but ignorance as a “solid or shifting body”.

Thomas Pynchon put it well in his introduction to a book of early short stories, in which he reflects on the insights arising from re-reading his early work.

''Everybody gets told to write about what they know, the trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything - or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well…” [Pynchon T. Slow Learner Brown. 1984.]

“Unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.” remains a resonant phrase and although he was speaking of individual writerly psychology the observation has, with the passing decades accrued far wider currency in the politics in the post-truth era.

3. From Junk Bonds to Junk Data

The attack on the Capital was US liberal democracy's near-death experience. It was the political equivalent of Capitalism’s heart attack of 2008, signified by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But in place of CDOs, ‘junk bonds’ and ‘sub-prime mortgages’, the events of 2019 substituted ‘junk-facts and ‘sub-prime data’.

Multiple images from Trump's attempted coup revealed just how many of his most ardent followers, were simultaneously declaring their allegiance to the mysterious conspiracy cult of QAnon. This visible overlap of support for both Trump and Q demonstrated in real-time that the crisis in knowledge and the crisis in politics really had become one and the same thing. We might (as Geert Lovink declared) have reached peak data but there is little likelihood of reaching peak ignorance any time soon.

4. Pinker's Question

As is well known, QAnon's calling card was ‘Pizzagate’, one of the more deranged of the recent spate of conspiracy theories, in which it was alleged that children were kidnapped and ritually abused by a satanic cabal of paedophiles directed by Hillary Clinton who imprisoned the kids in the basement of a well-known Pizza parlour. This unhinged narrative circulated freely on the internet right up until the moment that a lone avenger, Edgar Welch, took it upon himself to rescue the kidnapped children, only to discover that not only were there no children in the basement. But the Pizza parlour in question didn’t even have a basement.

Edgar Welsh’s hapless rescue mission prompted psycholinguist and pundit, Stephen Pinker, to ask a useful question: “why, given the popularity of QAnon and Pizzagate, did only one lone avenger, take it upon himself to attempt to rescue the children?”

The reason, Pinker concludes, was a kind of willed ignorance. The other followers of Q, Pinker speculates, tacitly understood that the story was a fiction but suspended disbelief and continued to engage with an entertaining story. Pinker goes on to compare this kind conspiracy to “a multi-player game that gave participants a readymade community and was too enjoyable to fact check. "Myths like these” he concludes “are a lot more appealing than rationality”.

Pinker’s conclusion that the absence of a mass uprising to free the children points to a specific variant of ignorance as something ‘willed’ a form of social agency. A “selective choice (or Passive Construct). It’s the variant that “recognises that ignorance’s “political geography […]. less like a vacuum than a solid or shifting body – which travels through time and occupies space”. (R. Proctor-Agnotology)

The historian of science Robert Proctor together with linguist Ian Boal, introduced the term agnotology (the study of ignorance) and thus convened the discussion on ignorance as more than the “not yet known “. At an early stage, Proctor provisionally identified three variants : ignorance as a native state (or resource), ignorance as a lost realm (or selective choice), and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and strategic ploy (or active construct).

The conclusion Pinker reached as to why there were no more than one solitary rescue mission is an example of the second variant of “ignorance as selective choice”. And is extremely common in all walks of life. A classic example of ignorance of this variant is the stereotypical case of the English High Court judge interrupting council “to ask who the Spice Girls were, when that girl-band were at the peak of its popularity. Among the elite of British, education, which is to say the administration of knowledge and learning, at places like Eton, Harrow, Oxford, and Cambridge, is about ensuring ignorance of all the right things”.

It echoes Zizek’s ingenious addition to Donald Rumsfeld’s famous taxonomy (known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns) to which Zizek adds *unknown knowns*, for those truths one knows but refuse to acknowledge one knows.

5. ‘Conspiracy Without a Theory’

The Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, described how in 2014 Vladimir Putin smirked all the way through a TV interview, during the annexation of Crimea, all the while proclaiming that Russian soldiers “were just locals who had bought Russian military uniforms”. This argued Pomerantsev wasn’t so much “lying as effectively “removing the space where one can make a rational case…”.

The refusals embedded in Putin’s smirking denial/non-denial is an example of a relatively new mode of conspiracism: the so called ‘conspiracy without a theory’, identified by Russel Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s in their book ‘A Lot of People Are Saying’.

The book’s title is taken from one of Trump’s most familiar catch phrases. And it captures a form of that unlike classic conspiricism WITH a theory avoids any engagement with actual arguments, focusing instead on inuendo, repetition and raw assertion coupled with a ‘blatant disregard for the facts’. Muirhead and Rosenblum contrast this new mode with the more established classic conspiracy theories which retain the armature of reasoned research, elaborate detective work and the detailed evidence gathering required to uncover the hidden truth below the surface. The new conspiracists dispense with these niceties.

6. Origins of Agnotology

Study and reflection on the nature of knowledge has ancient pedigree encompassed by a familiar term, epistemology. Until relatively recently however the study of ignorance has not been so fortunate. This omission was eventually remedied by the introduction of the neologism ‘agnotology’. This term which combines the Greek agnosis (‘not knowing’ e.g. agnostic) with ontology, was coined by linguistic researcher, Ian Boal, when historian of science Richard Proctor asked him to identify or generate a suitable candidate.

This was no academic game. Proctor’s insistence that a new term was required came off the back of the decades spent researching the tobacco industry’s malign and sophisticated campaign to obscure the medical evidence for the harmful effects of smoking. Proctor’s research culminated in the publication of The Golden Holocaust, a monumental and damning account of big tobacco’s industrial scale corporate crime. Beyond its intrinsic importance the book acts as a handbook in recognising similar tactics currently being undertaken by the fossil fuel industry in their efforts to create phoney controversy around the evidence for man-made climate change.

The nature of the tactics uncovered by the book is shockingly captured in an internal memo circulated in 1969 by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company. The key section is: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” Proctor goes on to ask “what evil geniuses came up with the scheme to associate the continued manufacture of cigarettes with prudence, using the call for more research to slow the threat of regulation, but it must rank as one of the greatest triumphs of American corporate connivance? ”

7. New Circles of Ignorance

These new realist movements are not restricted to the visual arts. The literary scholar, Toral Gajarawala has written an insightful analysis of so-called ‘Finance Fiction’, a genre of novel that emerged after the financial crash of 2008. Notable examples are Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, John Lanchester’s Capital and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

Though analytical and data rich these fictions go beyond the straightforwardly evidential, as Gajarawala points out that, “for all the information these novels provide, their ultimate achievement is to draw a circle around our ignorance. Yes, it makes much of the raw data of experience, but only in order to direct our attention to the full range of our illiteracy.” Towards the end of the article Gajarawala reminds us that the early modern realists were not just by-standers. Artists like Courbet and “novelists like Dreiser and Zola were committed socialists’ naturalism was a political project as much as an investigative or an aesthetic one.” “Who” she asks, “are their counterparts today?"

David Garcia. June 2022