Feverish Nonknowledge, or Intuition at the Boiling Point

ABSTRACT

This discussion situates Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s (this issue) embrace of natural science within the third industrial (or hyperindustrial) revolution in which information eclipses knowledge. Knowledge has its limits and thus begets excess or what I call feverish nonknowledge, whereas information is thought to be limitless and is tied to the wholeness that Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow associate with Bohm’s implicate order. Such wholeness rests on a disavowed notion of the “us” or the “we” who it ostensibly unites. This disavowal cannot be understood without considering slavery, colonialism, and capitalism as psychopolitical conditions that made (and continue to make) scientific advance possible. The ethical question for the sciences thus becomes how to orient to social, historical, and libidinal excess, rather than how excess can be better accounted for (i.e., disavowed) through a transcendental wholeness by which all subjects are supposedly bound.

This article refers to:

Varieties of Clinical Intuition: Explicit, Implicit, and Nonlocal Neurodynamics

View responses to this article:

Clinical Intuition under Scrutiny: From Potholes to Possibilities

Notes

¹ Stiegler writes of savoir-vivre, but I add the prefix “non,” which, in my view, is already implicit in the original concept.

² Human is not the right term here, but the distinctions between “inhuman” and “non-inhuman” in Stiegler are too complex to address in this already dense discussion. The risk of not addressing these distinctions is that my emphasis on experience could seem like I am arguing for some form of anthropocentrism and postmodern subjectivity (or what Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow consider a Cartesian dualism in disguise), which is not my intention. If anything, I am arguing for a more radical dualism, namely that of subjectivity without subjects and objectivity without objects, or a dualism in which any Cartesian certainty is feverishly held in suspense: “the subject/object connection is … one of those false lights” (emphasis in original, Bataille in Lee, 2001).

³ In the previous work, I associate this risk and suspension with riding instincts, even to die, or primary preoccupation as a libidinal process that undergirds transitional experience (Butler, 2019a).

⁴ The demands of technology increasingly exploit science, dictating the research that is funded, and largely determining the purview of scientific research.

⁵ Lyotard argues that postmodern science primarily relies on paralogism or micronarrative rather than metanarrative or grand theory, but the wholeness in question reads more like the latter than the former. If metanarrative still seems to inform our contemporary, even in truncated form, we may not be so “post”-modern after all. On paralogism, see Lyotard (1984).

⁶ Subject is not the best term here, since blackness is condemned as constitutively transgressive rather than subjected to the law as if it may or may not transgress. This seems to be why Marriott (2018) writes about blackness as condemned rather than judged (or condemned in a way that overdetermines judgment).

⁷ Lyotard (1984) gives the example of how Descartes ran out of money by the end of Discourse on Method. “No money, no proof – and that means no verification of statements and no truth” (pp. 44–45).

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Daniel G. Butler

Daniel G. Butler, LMFT, is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in independent practice, a doctoral candidate in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and a Contributing Editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Daniel is a past recipient of the Peter Loewenberg Prize and the Martin and Alexandra Symonds Prize, and his articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Théologiques, the Journal of Psychosocial Studies, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. As a 2020-2021 Fellow of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Daniel is collaborating on a public humanities project with UC San Francisco’s Infant-Parent Program and the Community Psychoanalytic Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.