Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding

Prologue

prologue Even though humans are more committed to language than other animals, we use more than words in every aspect of engagement with our lives. We are intricately and intimately connected with others and with the world, and most of these connections happen alongside, beneath, and in other spheres than the words we say and the propositions we formulate. We know how to say some things, and how to make claims and test them. This sort of knowledge —propositional knowledge—has been often understood as the only form of knowledge worth thinking about. We also know otherwise—we understand things that cannot be or are not spoken, and we may suspect that this form of understanding is important. In this book, I attend to this second form of knowing, which I call “implicit understanding.” I argue that various forms of knowing otherwise than propositionally are vital to current possibilities for flourishing, expressing dignity, and acting. I have two main aims: first to delineate the differences and the connections among four sorts of implicit understanding, and second to show how they are crucial to personal and political transformation. Indeed, it is often at points of transition that the work of implicit understanding is most palpable —when people shift their gender enactment, when they take up new political orientations, when they aim to create new social relations. Consider Dorothy Allison’s narrative of feminist transformation: “When feminism exploded in my life, it gave me a vision of the world totally different from everything I had ever assumed or hoped” (1994, 167). Here, feminism offered a vision of the world that was new in two ways: it shifted an already present framework of presuppositions and provided different possibilities for future hope. Accounts of political transformation often highlight the new informationandunderstandinginvolvedinanindividual ’schange.AsAllison’snarrative suggests, they can also create a changed context for one’s assumptions and hopes. When this happens, political transformation takes root in something prologue | x deeper than what one can say, offering new expressive possibilities. Such possibilities speak to the implicitly political frameworks of understanding. It is important to think about this form of understanding. Every story I know about queerness and coming out, about gender and transitioning , about coming to political consciousness of racial formation and one’s own place in it, of struggle for economic justice, of coming to crip pride, unfolds a complex web of understanding. In that web, conceptual knowledge changes—the information one has and one’s ability to speak about it shifts, and people learn facts and figures they didn’t know. But that changed propositional knowledge is thoroughly enmeshed with other forms of understanding—feeling, somatic experience, skills and competencies, presuppositions and common sense. Thinking about the always socially situated work of striving to create the conditions for complex flourishing requires a thick understanding of these aspects of our experience. As I will show, there is wider range of such thinking than one might expect. This is true even within the discipline of philosophy, often seen (with reason) as most unfriendly to pushing the boundaries of propositionality and rationality narrowly construed. I am uneasily situated in relation to this discipline, sutured to philosophical topics and approaches by my interest in epistemology and political theory. I believe that it is possible to put people concerned about social justice in conversation with philosophers for the mutual aid of all concerned. This work is directed toward thinkers who are interested in knowledge—mostly philosophers—and also toward people looking to change the world—mostly social justice activists—(not mutually exclusive categories) because I believe that we need to consider implicit understanding far more deeply and synthetically from both directions. some preliminary definitions “Propositionality” here names claim-making activity; to put something propositionally is to put it in a linguistically intelligible form that could be evaluated as true or false. “Implicit understanding” names our background, taken-for-granted understanding of being in the world: The implicit is what provides the conditions for things to make sense to us. The implicit provides the framework through which it is possible to form propositions and also to evaluate them as true or false, and is thus instrumentally important. Implicit understandingisalsonon-instrumentallyimportant.Itnotonlyhelpsprovide prologue | xi the conditions for propositional work, it also occupies its own epistemic and political terrain, and in itself is vital to flourishing. That is, living well involves substantial implicit content, perhaps unspeakable but central to...