No time for nonsense!:The organization of learning and its limits in evolving governance

This essay introduces and frames the contributions to the special issue on learning and co-evolution in governance. It develops the argument that learning, dark learning and non-learning are necessarily entwined in governance, moreover, entwined in a pattern unique to each governance configuration and path. What can be learned collectively for the common good, what kind of knowledge and learning can be strategically used and shamelessly abused, and which forms of knowledge remain invisible, intentionally and unintentionally, emerges in a history of co-evolution of actors and institutions, power and knowledge, in governance. Learning becomes possible in a particular form of management of observation, of transparency and opacity, where contingency is precariously mastered by governance systems expected to provide certainty for communities

Nonknowledge: The Bibliographical Organization of Ignorance, Stupidity, Error, and Unreason: Part One

Starting with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom paradigm in information science it is possible to derive a model of the opposite of knowledge having hierarchical qualities. A range of counterpoints to concepts in the knowledge hierarchy can be identified and ascribed the overall term “nonknowledge.” This model creates a conceptual framework for understanding the connections between topics such as error, ignorance, stupidity, folly, popular misconceptions, and unreason by locating them as levels or phases of nonknowledge. The concept of nonknowledge links heretofore disconnected discourses on these individual topics by philosophers, psychologists, historians, sociologists, satirists, and others. Subject headings provide access to the categories of nonknowledge, but confusion remains due to the general failure of cataloging and classification to differentiate between works about nonknowledge and examples of nonknowledge

Ignorance in organisations : a systematic literature review

This study is linked to previous research that approaches organisations as systems of shared meaning where ignorance is created and sustained, either unintentionally or deliberately, through various social interactions,symbolic processes, and organisational structures. While previous studies have touched upon organisational ignorance, there is a lack of systematically conducted research on its many forms and its many sources. This study analyses the causes, characteristics, and consequences of organisational ignorance. By reporting a systematic review of the literature, the paper contributes to the theory of organizational ignorance by developing a framework of organisational ignorance comprising the manageability (intentional or unintentional) and dynamics (bounded or expanding) of ignorance. Instead of framing ignorance as something that should be avoided, the study adopts anuanced approach to the organisation of ignorance.© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The poetry and poetics of Douglas Oliver, 1973-1991

This dissertation is about the poetry and prose, published and unpublished, of the British poet Douglas Dunlop Oliver (1937-2000), written between 1973-1991. It traces the development of Oliver’s poetics from his early prose through his later poetry of the 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation makes extensive use of archive material stored in the Douglas Oliver Archive at the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex, the vast majority of which has thus far received little or no critical commentary or appraisal. Contained in the archive are a set of unpublished essays Oliver wrote as a mature undergraduate at the University of Essex between 1974-1975. In my first chapter, I discuss these essays and examine their philosophical and aesthetic standpoints in order to understand and expand upon Oliver’s published claims about the experience of reading poetry in his theoretical monograph Poetry and Narrative in Performance (1989). Oliver’s thinking about prosody and poetic language are then discussed in relation to his books of poetry on explicitly political subjects, The Diagram--Poems (1979) and The Infant and the Pearl (1985). My second and third chapters present close readings of Oliver’s poetry with a view to understanding and critiquing the political arguments conducted therein. My second chapter, on The Diagram--Poems, adds to the discussion of prosody the historical significance of Oliver’s thinking about “stupidity,” and reads the poetry’s political intervention in the light of such thinking. My third chapter, on The Infant and the Pearl, reads the poem’s critique of the contemporary political landscape with the help of the extensive scholarship on its prototype, the medieval Pearl, in order to explain and critique Oliver’s poem’s emphasis on national and interpersonal “unity.” The dissertation argues throughout that the inseparability of poetic form and political feeling is at the heart of Oliver’s practice as a poet

On design thinking, bullshit, and innovation

Design thinking (DT) has been widely promoted as a powerful approach for systematically achieving innovation, particularly in the world of management. Recently, however, some critical voices from design and science & technology studies have called bullshit on DT, accusing it instead of distorting and trivialising design methods and processes to serve purely commercial goals. Through an analysis of the recent history of design research and an overview of some (philosophical) accounts on the concept of “bullshit”, this paper shows that at least some of the criticism holds. However, it argues that a truly fruitful critique of DT needs to go beyond simple derision. Ultimately, this paper suggests that perhaps we should steer away from the idea that there is a designerly way of thinking, and focus instead on showing how designers, being “doers”, create maker’s knowledge. Designers, educators, managers, and anyone interested in understanding why design goes beyond a simple methodology perhaps might be interested in this account

A Stieglerianesque Critique Of Transhumanisms: On Narratives And Neganthropocene

While drawing from the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler throughout the paper, I commence by highlighting Zoltan Istvan’s representation of transhumanism in the light of its role in politics. I continue by elaborating on the notion of the promise of eternal life. After that I differentiate between subjects that are proper for philosophy (such as the mind or whether life is worth living) and science (measurable and replicable). The arguments mostly concern mind-uploading and at the same time I elaborate on a simple critique of mind-body dualism, which is one of the key imagined orders exploitable by technologies in the narratives of transhumanism present in popular culture. This is reframed as a problem of action. The focus of this article is on the claim that certain transhumanisms are dangerous forms of Neo-Darwinism. It comes from a critical assessment of capital and the exploitation of bodies through market forces. Entropy is a process of growing disorder, while neganthropy is an anthropological struggle against exploitation, not only of bodies, but of all ecosystems of the Earth. The arguments of Stiegler from a collection of lectures are recapitulated, and his claims are presented through the prism of transhuman narrative, with a particular focus on Christian Salmon's position in the book Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind

Democracy and Deference: Or, Why Democracy Needs People Who Know How to Shut Up and Listen

The charge for this conference asked us to consider the future of liberal democracy given the challenges it presently faces. Two challenges in particular give me pause: First, the issues that are most in need of governance are now happening at the transnational level. We face the possibility of an altered climate due to increased carbon emissions; increased political turbulence due to increased migration flows, including a resurgence of refugees and, of course, increased resistance to refugee admissions; and increasingly complex international processes for both the production of goods and the movement of capital. None of these issues can be solved at a local level; all require the will to engage in politics across differences in global institutions and forums. Second, the default tool for political governance—liberal democracy, or some version of it—is increasingly under assault. Even in stable democracies such as the United States, trust in government is near historic lows. Fewer people are willing to engage in politics across differences in favor of some version of authoritarian populism. Even when authoritarianism has not taken hold, there is a rise in secessionism, whether literal or the more nuanced sort of separatism that insists that one’s political adversaries are traitors or fools… In this Article, I will discuss three possible spaces: education, especially higher education; political activism and the modes in which it might be done; and journalism. I must say, though, that I am not confident that any of these sites will actually be able to do the job. It is not clear that the problems of liberal democracy are soluble, whether through these means or any others. Nevertheless, I would like for us to try. If we are to abandon liberal democracy, it should only be after we have tried our best to be the sort of people for whom liberal democracy was possible. Epistocracy if necessary; but, emphatically, not necessarily epistocracy. In the next section of the Article, I will describe three forms of deference that seem necessary for the just and efficient administration of liberal democracy. In the following section, I will describe the three sites at which we might try to build these habits of deference. I will conclude with some brief thoughts about whether or not such efforts are likely to succeed