“Why is a Platonic Binary Useful?” – Hannah Harder

It seems that Jon Mckenzie posits the gap between doxa and episteme as a productive negative space that can reveal new forms of knowledge. These terms differentiate between the entangled, contextual knowing that is placed against formal knowledge production. My studies in media, art and performance have shown that we can engage with meaning through formal explorations of time, space and perception. Often it is useful to explore terms like liminality, liveness, transition, or transmediation- concepts that help us to explore some conditions of phenomena and their subsequent perceived meaning. This is the current of episteme, in which we mine precise words that solidify concepts and their usefulness. Classical scholarship allows us to structure clean arguments and weave together narratives by freezing and molding complex moments. On the other hand, doxa seems more wily as it is contrasted with the former. In my understanding, doxa includes everything. In formal terms it is everything quotidien or embodied and concurrently entangled with people, material, and information. It presents diverse and amorphous activities that we can only catch a glimpse of through writing and extracting it from its fluid, contextual emergence.

In McKenzie’s book, Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement (2019), combining the disparate worlds of doxa and episteme will always unfold new worlds. He writes, “Transmedia knowledge and collaborative creativity can create small worlds where different knowledges and different ontologies co-exist, similar to the liminal and liminoid spaces Victor Turner described, where cultural symbols may be questioned and rearranged” (McKenzie 2019, 117). Episteme, along with embodied perception, or doxa, are disparate aspects of knowledge that exist as multiples of contemporaneous worlds, waiting to interact and bring out new forms of knowledge and meaning. While doxa seems to lie unreachingly parallel to episteme, there are many genealogies and perspectives that can help to inform and advance formal epistemology. In our contemporary obligation towards performance, we can find new ways to perform concretized knowledge production through the massive potential that lies in “other” ways of knowing.

It is freeing to be able to create connections, adjacencies and potentialities that have been previously unconstituted in the rigidity of academic expectations. In our modern performance that is plagued with moving past post-colonialism, post-modernism, or post-war anxieties, it feels we are curating our world, creating new narratives. We can see this as people perform activism or identity politics, however productive or detrimental to society. To urge an academic performance that allows the undercurrent of doxa to inform episteme helps to create a variety of worlds that can push grand narratives out of the center of our cultural knowledge. By highlighting the gaps between these worlds, we can further represent marginalized voices or underrepresented worlds through spinning new stories and placing them in direct dialogue with dominant, epistemological worlds.

References: 

• McKenzie, Jon. 2019. “Becoming Cosmographer: Co-designing Worlds” in Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement : A StudioLab Manifesto. Digital Education and Learning. Palgrave Pivot, 109-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20574-4.

*Image credits: “Orange line” by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0