Known / Unknown

Alicia Eggert, Known, Unknown (2015) 

Neon with custom controller (30 x 90 x 12 in.)

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Twenty years ago, when the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered a question at a news briefing by differentiating between known knowns (i.e., things we know we know), known unknowns (i.e., things we know we don't know), and unknown unknowns (i.e., things we don't know we don't know), his remark was met with ridicule in certain quarters [1].

And yet, of course, it makes perfect sense and Rumsfeld was referring to concepts that members of the intelligence community (and NASA) had used ever since the idea of unknown unknowns was first developed in the work of psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the mid-1950s. 

 

Individuals involved in project management and strategic planning also have a penchant for the language of things that are known and unknown and I agree with the cultural commentator and author Mark Steyn who described Rumsfeld's comment as a "brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter" [2].    

 

For me, as a Nietzschen philosopher concerned with chance and uncertainty, I suppose it's the unknown unknowns that most excite; for they determine true events which come out of the blue and cannot be anticipated - such as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which saw off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

 

But I'm also interested in a category of knowledge that Slavoj Žižek posits in addition to the three mentioned by Rumsfeld; namely, the unknown known ... [3]

 

That is to say, things which we hide from ourselves or refuse to openly acknowledge that we know; things which embarrass or shame people into silence and a false profession of ignorance. Things, for example, such as the death camps in Nazi Germany (of course the German citizens knew), or the child rape gangs still operating in many English cities (of course the British authorities know).       

 

From an ethical point of view, facing up to the unknown known - that which we don't want to know - is perhaps the most crucial thing of all; for as Žižek rightly argues, our disavowed beliefs often hide obscene practices and have deadly consequences.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Donald Rumsfeld was speaking at a U.S. Department of Defense news briefing on 12 February, 2002. His statement on the known and unknown was subject to much commentary and scorned by those who neither understood the validity or importance of what he was saying; this included members of The Plain English Campaign, who presented Rumsfeld with their Foot in Mouth Award in 2003 (something awarded annually to a public figure deemed to have made a baffling or nonsensical comment).

 

[2] See Mark Steyn, 'Rummy speaks the truth, not gobbledygook', Daily Telegraph (9 December, 2003): click here to read online. 

[3] See Slavoj Žižek's essay 'What Donald Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows About Torture and the Iraq War', In These Times (21 May, 2004): click here to read online. 

 

 

And What are Chickens For in a Destitute Time?

Hühnergeist (SA/2021)

 

 

A sub-species of a good-looking bird from Southeast Asia known as the red juglefowl, chickens were originally reared for fighting or ceremonial purposes and there are numerous references to them in myth, folklore, and literature. Indeed, once upon a time, such sacred animals had greater divine status even than man and only they were worthy of sacrifice [1]. 

 

But then someone had the idea of eating them ...

 

And now they are reared and slaughtered in their billions as a cheap source of food and the intensively farmed chicken has just about the most miserable (if mercifully short) life of any bird on the planet - hardly a day goes by without some fresh horror being revealed (to a largely indifferent public). 

 

These intelligent and sensitive creatures are not just killed, but negated as beings in their very birdhood by the system within which they are enframed. That's what Heidegger meant when he suggested a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the manufacture of corpses in Nazi extermination camps [2]. 

 

And it's surprising, I think, that there are critics who still find this idea morally insensitive and/or philosophically absurd. What would it take, one wonders, to have them acknowledge the essential sameness that reduces all life - be it avian or human being - to raw material ...? 

 

To argue, like Žižek, that there is no malevolent will to humiliate and punish birds by the farmers - whereas this plays a key role in the treatment of prisoners prior to their murder - may or may not be true, but I don't see that intentionality alters anything; you still end up with a lot of dead chickens [3].

 

I can't help hoping that, one day, the spirit of these birds will come home to roost ... Then we'll understand that our destiny has never been separate from theirs [4].    

  

       

Notes

 

[1] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses', in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser, (The University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 129-141. The line I'm paraphrasing is on p. 133. Later in the text, Baudrillard develops this point and writes: 

 

"Whatever it may be, animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to an experimental dissection. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to industrial breeding." [134]  

 

[2] See Martin Heidegger's Bremen lecture of December 1949 entitled Das Ge-Stell in volume 79 of his Gesamtausgabe (1994). The English translation of this volume, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, is published as the Breman and Freiburg Lectures, (Indiana University Press, 2012), and the above text appears as 'Positionality'.   

 

[3] In other words, we should speak of impact rather than intention.

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, 'The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses', Simulacra and Simulation, p. 133.