Feverish Nonknowledge, or Intuition at the Boiling Point

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.