Freund Humanus

This is an idea I’ve been carrying around with me for a long time, and it reaches back to conversations in late 1980’s and early 1990’s South Africa with Peter Horn, an intellectual who had a profound influence on me. Peter Horn was an anti-apartheid activist and poet, and an eccentric scholar of German literature who penned what I think of as some of the first postcolonial interventions in German theory. But that’s another story.

The epistemodiversity story begins for me at the University of Cape Town in the troubled and elated years between 1987 and 1991, when Peter was dean of the Faculty of Arts. One day, in frustration, he told me of a meeting he had just attended where, once again, he was forced to defend a small humanities department against the humanities giants, like English, history, philosophy. At this time, universities across the world received shrinking state funding, and the humanities in general were facing a legitimacy crisis. Universities were seen increasingly as training places for the technologists who would keep society running smoothly as it was, and not a protected space where bold thinking was encouraged. As resources dwindled and legitimacy was questioned, the dominant metaphor for talking about small departments was Darwinian. Peter said he was tired of listening to people talk about survival of the fittest. If you wanted an analogy from evolutionary biology for talking about institutions, why not talk about biodiversity?

That was a long time ago. But I believe Peter was right in a much more profound way than quibbling over metaphors to describe the contest of faculties or squabbles between university disciplines. After all, there are very good reasons why his discipline and mine, German Studies, did not deserve a place in the apartheid and postapartheid university. But I’m interested in the reasons why it did. The apartheid and postapartheid university should never have privileged German Studies over African languages, but that is not an argument against German Studies. It’s an argument for African Languages.

The biodiversity model tells us we don’t have to choose one underfunded discipline over another one, just because neither of them produce patents or multi-million-dollar doners. The struggle for resources that leads to this choice is built on a false model, not only of life on this planet, but also of how to organize and institutionalize knowledge of life. The survival of the fittest can only lead to monocultures of learning which themselves imperil our ability to imagine alternatives to the ways of knowing that have brought us to this disastrous moment in human history.

Meanwhile, there are serious moves in institutions of higher learning worldwide to address the demise of languages, itself comparable to the death of species. There are some 6,000 languages in the world, but almost the entire population of the planet speaks 15 of them. And many of the remainder are threatened with extinction. The survival of some languages and the demise of others has a lot to do with the history of imperialism and its present iteration, economic globalization. My present university, the University of Toronto, has a history of privileging European languages over indigenous ones, similar to the apartheid university in South Africa. But recently, it is beginning to think about addressing this deficit on an institutional level.

The death of languages is a form of epistemicide, or in other words “the murder of knowledge. Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it. In the most extreme cases, such as that of European expansion, epistemicide was one of the conditions of genocide.” That is a citation (p. 92) from a study on inequality in knowledges, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s 2014 book, Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide.

One subsection has the title: “The Ecology of Knowledge and the Inexhaustible Diversity of World Experience.” This is a precise banner for the idea of epistemodiversity. The observation is simple and convincing: “Throughout the world, there are not only very diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life, and spirit but also many and very diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge and the criteria that may be used to validate it” (p. 192).

Arguably, however, universities are not the right place to do justice to epistemodiversity. As mono-cultures of learning, they are more or less useless, with their built-in assumptions about the disciplinary structures of knowledge, their perpetuation of certain normalized career-subjectivities, their utilitarian relationship to funding, their fundamental belief that knowledge is inseparable from commerce, their perpetuation of social inequality, etc. etc. And, as the public funding of universities as a place of free inquiry and free education disappears, the uselessness of the university as a site of epistemodiversity is likely to increase.

When languages die, worlds die. But it’s not only languages in the narrow sense that see a struggle between diversity and mono-cultures. Think of google’s algorithms, delivering cascades of sameness to purportedly individualized publics (or pseudo-publics, to be more accurate). Think of how the politics of intellectual property and patents carefully excises pieces of knowledge from the systems in which they were intelligible, recasting them in mono-cultures where the only language they speak is financial. Think of the immense standardization of information storage and recall, where forms of preserving ideas are constantly made semi-obsolete, absorbed into the newer versions of software, which themselves are increasingly locked into hardware systems built with planned obsolescence.   

It’s so simple really. The mono-cultural beliefs and practices that constitute knowledge in the world I occupy have produced disastrous consequences for humanity. Sure, they have produced wonderful effects and insights, but these often come about through strange coincidences and unexpected discoveries that themselves testify to the need to preserve epistemodiversity. And to expect the mono-cultures of knowledge to dig us out of the hole they made is not very wise. Where else do we turn, then? The first step is to realise that there is an “else” that needs to be taken seriously.