Who knows where : a treatise on indisciplinary thinking

Abstract

The production of knowledge has been immensely tied to the production of space in both language and application. Through the use of metaphors and metonymy coupled with spatial strategies of exclusion and delimitation, knowledge has been ramified into disciplines and fields whose continuous corollary integration in the distribution of labour reproduces taxonomies evident in the political and topological organization of the world. According to Max Weber, modernity dangerously establishes a fundamental disunity of reason that through rationalization creates three spheres of value: the differentiated zones of science, art and law. This arises not simply from the creation of separate institutional entities but through the specialization of cognitive, normative, and aesthetic knowledge that in turn permeates and fragments everyday consciousness. Today this process is accelerating: 'interdisciplinarity', 'smart' architecture and the 'open lab' projects increasingly happen under the sway of a seemingly new ideology whose goal is to form a 'social physics' that controls, optimizes, and predicts both labor and dwelling. As a cybernetics that alleges to cognitively capture the environment and reproduce the self through data accumulation, surveillance and the ever-changing representations of AI becomes more opaquely predominant, labor is further obfuscated by capital while more territories are asymmetrically raided and enclosed for new primitive accumulations to take form. How to break from these epistemological boundaries that, heavily propelled by an enlightened expertism, occupy cognizance with pervasive claims to master and differentiate it from life? In this thesis, I will propose an 'indisciplinary' epistemology that studies and grapples While presenting indisciplinary studies on the legacy of polymath Ibn Al Haitham, the spatial politics and knowledge produced around a post-war landfill and its reconstruction, and the use of war as testing grounds in Al, I will ruminate on my work under the indisciplinary platform I have founded, The Society of False Witnesses. Through occupying disciplines in incomputable collaborations, expropriations, writing and cryptography, The Society of False Witnesses playfully probes exilic spaces and their epistemological repercussions on the performance and lexica of attestation. Hereby, both evidential and imaginary as well as past and preemptive genealogies will be limned to suggest an indisciplinary thinking that is in constant negotiation with its potential spatialization in relation to the cognitive and hidden arrangements of life, future and trace.