Sensuous Knowledge

A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone

Minna Salami

• Verlag: Zed Books
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786995285
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

In Sensuous Knowledge, Minna Salami draws on Africa-centric, feminist-first and artistic traditions to help us rediscover inclusive and invigorating ways of experiencing the world afresh. Combining the playfulness of a storyteller with the insight of a social critic, the book pries apart the systems of power and privilege that have dominated ways of thinking for centuries – and which have led to so much division, prejudice and damage. And it puts forward a new, sensuous, approach to knowledge: one grounded in a host of global perspectives – from Black Feminism to personal narrative, pop culture to high art, Western philosophy to African mythology – together comprising a vision of hope for a fragmented world riven by crisis. Through the prism of this new knowledge, Salami offers fresh insights into the key cultural issues that affect women's lives. How are we to view Sisterhood, Motherhood or even Womanhood itself? What is Power and why do we conceive of Beauty? How does one achieve Liberation? She asks women to break free of the prison made by ingrained male-centric biases, and build a house themselves – a home that can nurture us all. Sensuous Knowledge confirms Minna Salami as one the most important spokespeople of today, and the arrival of a blistering new literary voice.

of KNOWLEDGE

To which poetry would be made subsequent, or, indeed, rather precedent, as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

—John Milton

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.

—Audre Lorde

In the beginning, there was only the sky, the sea, and the gods. Olokun was the Sea Goddess, and Olorun was the Sky God. One day, Obatala, the god of creativity, asked the Sky God if he could create land and living creatures to alleviate his boredom. Olorun approved, and Obatala created Ife, the great city that remains the cradle of Yoruba civilization. However, when Olokun found out that Obatala created earth and land in her territory without consulting her, she retaliated with a great flood that inundated the first city of humankind.

Eventually Ife was rebuilt, and it became the “ondaiye (the place of creation), orirun (the source of life), and ibi oju ti nmo wa (the place from where the sun, or enlightenment, rises),” as the eminent professor Banji Akintoye describes Ife in “A History of the Yoruba people.” But the luminous strength of feminine wisdom was out of balance in the new Ife, and the genders were locked in an eternal power struggle.

To prosper, the people received ogbon, which refers to knowledge, or phronesis (practical wisdom). However, the gods knew that ogbon had to affect both the minds and hearts of the people. So they divided ogbon into ogbon-ori and ogbon-inu, concepts that literally translated mean “knowledge of the head” and “knowledge of the gut” but that respectively refer to intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligence. To have only one type of knowledge, according to the Yoruba epos, was to be only partly wise.

Just as ogbon-ori and ogbon-inu together form ogbon, so too are intellectual and emotional intelligence two sides of the same coin of knowledge. But throughout modern history, the dominant belief is that all worthy knowledge is rational and logical. The prevailing dogma is that all valid ways of knowing are strictly assessed by the cognitive skills of reasoning, quantification, and deductive inquiry. And so, from a young age, those with the best grades in subjects involving rationality and logic—mathematics, science, chemistry, and so forth—are graded the most intelligent. In fact, the mere tradition of ranking children is a result of this mode of thinking. As adults, we continue to evaluate intelligence according to ratable and hierarchical processes.

We do not view knowledge as something that can be accessed, and assessed, through the arts and their connection to the emotions, senses, and embodied experience. We associate talent with the arts but not knowledge. Yet art is also suited to explaining reality because art captures reality from the inside out. Art explains who we are because our existence is artful. We are not simply rational and mental beings, we are also emotional and physical beings. Art is a way to understand and change reality just as much as quanitifable information is. This is why ogbon had to speak to both the intellect and the emotions.

Stories turn into knowledge, and knowledge transforms into matter. The dualist worldview separates matter from story, but narrative is the matter from which we build our worldview, which in turn becomes physical objects: books, buildings, borders, and so on. In our bodies, knowledge also transforms into matter. Just as the first structure that forms in the human embryo is the spinal cord, so too is knowledge the spine of all other ideas that shape our lives. How we move and feel in the world, the air we breathe, the health of our trees, the food we eat, the ideologies we support, the way we dance and make love are all reflections of what we know.

The idea that calculable reasoning is the only worthy way to explain reality through is one of the most dangerous ideas ever proposed. Our approach to knowledge has become fundamentalistically rule-bound and rigid. Civilization thirsts for humanistic thinking as the Sahara is thirsty for water. The more robotic society becomes, the more social problems there are, which then once again encourages more surveyable diagnostics. As always, the poorest in society pay the highest price for this assessment-obsessed dynamic. In the UK, councils are increasingly using algorithms to make decisions about social welfare. Everywhere, rule-set, computable methods increasingly make key decisions about people’s complex realities leaving those who most need to be listened to in the hands of a computer’s authoritative verdict.

The incapacity to listen serves to suppress feeling, which results in toxicity because it overlooks actuality. The reason why the most violent people tend to be male is because the social education teaches men to repress their emotions. The repression of emotions always leads to violence, both physical and nonphysical—both toward oneself, and others.

We need an approach to knowledge that synthesizes the imaginative and rational, the quantifiable and immeasurable, the intellectual and the emotional. Without feeling, knowledge becomes stale; without reason, it becomes indelicate. We need an approach that measures wisdom not only by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or gross domestic product (GDP) but also by how ethically we develop our societies. We need knowledge that affects the interior as well as the exterior. Ogbon-inu and ogbon ori. Sensuous Knowledge.

By sensuous, I don’t mean sensual. While sensuality is related to bodily appetites and self-indulgent pleasure involving the physical senses (touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing), sensuousness transcends the instincts. When something is sensuous, it affects not only your senses but your entire being—your mind, body, and soul. Books are sensuous, for example. You can see, touch, and smell them. You can hear them in audio format and taste their words on your tongue. Books are tangible objects of myriad textures—aged, hardback, hand stitched and so on. They are mentally stimulating, therapeutic, and they potentially transform your deepest thought patterns. They affect you entirely.

When the poet John Milton coined the term sensuous in his 1644 tractate, “Of Education,” it was precisely to avoid the sexual connotation in the word sensual. And so he described his genre—poetry—as one that was “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” Sensuous Knowledge is thus a poetic approach; it is the marriage of emotional intelligence with intellectual skill. It is perceiving knowledge as a living and breathing entity rather than as a packaged product to passively consume. It is encountering knowledge as a partner rather than a servant—or as a lord, for that matter. It means treating knowledge as precious, so that it can hone you into an embodiment of its merit. Sensuous Knowledge is knowledge that infuses the mind and body with aliveness leaving its impact behind like the wake of perfume. It is knowledge that is pliable and not hard as rocks. Sensuous Knowledge means pursuing knowledge for elevation and progress rather than out of an appetite for power.

In the bestselling book Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychologist Daniel Kahneman, the author makes an argument similar to the ancient Yoruba philosophy of ogbon. Kahneman argues that we make decisions with the aid of two internal systems, which he calls system 1 and system 2.

System 1 is an emotional, intuitive system that “has little understanding of logic and statistics” while system 2 is a reflective, deductive system that is “capable of reasoning.” You could say that system 1 is comparable to ogbon-inu, knowledge of the gut, while system 2 is comparable to ogbon-ori, knowledge of the head.

There is a crucial difference, however. In the typical binary way of Europatriarchal knowledge (if the names “system 1” and “system 2” don’t already speak volumes), Kahneman sees the two systems as involved in “a psychodrama with two characters,” with the emotional system 1 being the less intelligent character than the logical system 2. In contrast, you could say that the Yoruba mythological theory of knowledge sees the two systems in a passionate love story with two enamored characters instead.

I’m not presumptuous enough to dismiss the scientific research of a Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychologist, especially as I am not an expert on Dual Process Theory (DPT), the psychological field of which Kahneman’s systems 1 and 2 are an example.

In fact, experts in the DPT field have challenged Kahneman’s thinking. For example, in the provocative book titled The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding, where researchers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that the intellectual capacity to reason is itself an intuition—an emotional function. They argue that intuition, like reason, plays a huge role in our ability to make sense of our environment. The renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has also put forward the idea that rather than being obstructed by emotion, as is usually assumed, reason is directed by it. According to Damasio’s “somatic marker hypothesis,” emotional experiences (or somatic markers) override reason when we make decisions. In short, our emotional response to a situation is the basis for our rational choice.

There are many other important, if conflicting, theories about the fundamental question in consciousness studies known as the mind-body problem. Epiphenomenalism posits that there is no such thing as the mind at all, that there is just a body reacting to life. Pantheism, at the other end of the spectrum, argues that the mind is a collective project of sorts where everyone is impacted by everyone else’s thoughts and actions. As Baruch Spinoza, who is credited with forming pantheism, said in “Proposition Seven,” “The order and connection of the thought is identical to the order and connection of things.” But nobody has provided a satisfactory solution to what David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness,” which simply put is the question of why humans have feelings. Perhaps, considering that we are only using half of our knowledge, ogbon-ori, it’s no surprise that this remains a hard problem!

The truly hard problem is that the fragmented knowledge system in use today is unable to deal with the real issues confronting humanity because it neglects the experienced side of reality. Our educational systems are stale; they teach how to transform the brain but not the psyche; they explain how to design evolved societies but not how to be evolved citizens of them; they claim that emotions—central as they are to life—are incapable of explaining existence.

And so, despite living in the information age with an abundance of insight, we are incapable of solving pressing problems such as social injustice, sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, climate change, poverty, restlessness, mental health issues, and loneliness. Regardless of how educated or developed a society is, these same problems are causing despair and division everywhere. So we must concede that we are either approaching the wrong problems or we are approaching the problems wrongly. My stance is the latter. There is no soul to knowledge production.

The rigid, rule-bound, robotic way that dominates how we view knowledge today is what I refer to as Europatriarchal Knowledge, a hierararchy-fixated construct of knowledge that was initiated by elite European men as propaganda to solidify their worldviews on a massive scale.

The word propaganda comes from to propagate, which originally referred to the ability of plants to breed and multiply from one generation to another. It is etymologically apt, for the ability to adapt from generation to generation is precisely the magnificence of Europatriarchal Knowledge, the narrative that centers assessment and quantification as the epitome of knowing and that positions the European phenotype and male genotype as particularly gifted in the production of said knowledge.

Europatriarchal Knowledge has its roots in the Age of Discovery. It was during this period in history that European monarchs first sent explorers on voyages and expansions to world regions thought of as “the unknown.”

They were motivated by an adage—“knowledge is power.” It was the same saying that black progressives would later use as a slogan to end deception. However, whereas Civil Rights activists meant that knowledge is the power to determine “their destiny and identity,” as Ebony magazine published in a 1969 special edition titled “The Black Revolution,” the seventeenth-century British philosopher Francis Bacon, who coined the adage, meant it literally. Knowledge was a tool of control: it was man’s God-given right to know and shape nature to his intents and purposes.

Bacon’s Novum Organon (1620) helped to shift the general attitude in Europe away from the idea that knowledge was something to preserve, as it had been in medieval times, to the idea that knowledge was something to acquire, as it became in the modern world. It is typically Bacon’s method of induction that is seen as a forerunner to the paradigm of knowledge we adhere to today, but I would argue that his contribution to perceiving knowledge as something we are in a race to acquire is just as crucial. To acquire means “to gain possession of,” and this precisely is how we approach knowledge—as a quantifiable thing to be controlled and possessed in vast quantities, at all costs. Our politics, economics, laws, media, education, and policy are all formed around the fundamental position at the heart of Europatriarchal Knowledge, namely, that the purpose of amassing knowledge is ultimately to rank, compete, and dominate.

I use the phrase Europatriarchal Knowledge rather than, say, empire, superpower, or white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as the black feminist scholar bell hooks astutely calls the system we live in, because in this book we are reimagining the narrative behind knowledge production (the framing story, or the metanarrative) rather than the structure it produces. The two are, of course, closely tied; the structural and political systems of white supremacy, capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism are the raison d’être of Europatriarchal Knowledge. The point of labeling it this way is, however, to distinguish the narrative from the structures that it creates so that we can, hopefully, explore if a different narrative would consequently produce a different structure. Basically, to change the structure, we first need to change the story about the structure.

It is possible. The Me Too movement, for example, has fundamentally changed the story of how we speak about sexual assault in the mainstream. It shifted the narrative from silence to voice, and from shame to blame. This in return chan...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Mountain
• of Knowledge
• of Liberation
• of Decolonization
• of Identity
• of Blackness
• of Womanhood
• of Sisterhood
• of Power
• of Beauty
• Recommended Reading