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OFFERING

Heather Menzies

From Knowing Bodies to Global Knowledge Systems

Theres a lesson in the fact that after the terrible Tsunamis struck all of those seaboundaried countries December 26, 2004, few animals washed up dead on the beaches. When giant waves tore through the Yala National wildlife park, home to hundreds of wild elephants, boars and leopards in Sri Lanka, none of these animals died, but 40 tourists who were in the park at the time did. Relief workers had dreaded going to some of the really remote islands, fearing that the stone-age tribes who lived there would be lost. It turns out that, on Sentinel Island for example, the Jarawa Tribe had survived almost unscathed. Because of the knowledge passed down from generation to generationfrom how to read patterns in the wind, the sea and the birds to oral stories such as the one carrying forward knowledge from the last great Tsunami in 1907they knew what to do under the circumstances. The tribes people turned down the offers of assistance, and refused to let the journalists photograph them. Your world is outside, one told a journalist. So is our knowledge. The story of the modern world is many stories, but one of them is how knowledge, and the social process of knowing, came to be separated from the body. In the former category, Adam Smiths ideas for divid[ing] up and organiz[ing] work in more productive ways, as he put it in The Wealth of Nations, had a lot to do with this (Smith 1937: 18). In pre-modern ways of doing things, to the extent that we can say we understand them, the accent wasnt on maximizing abstractions like GNP, but on the immediate contextbe that survival, cultural expression or ritual display. The method was holistic, to use Ursula Franklins insightful typology, not prescriptive (Franklin 1999: 10). Understood in knowledge terms, both the work and its product were an extension of the workers skill, strength, knowledge, agility and ingenuity. Moreover, this knowledge was embedded in the spinner or weaver, the cheese maker or snowshoe makers body (or rather body-mind, or mindful body). As such, the knowledge was inseparable from craft traditions handed down by elders and master

crafters through observation, hands-on instruction and storytelling in apprenticeships. There was a time element in this as well as the spatial elements of tools and materials, associated with what poet and essayist William Morris called doing a thing duly (Morris 1993: 53). This meant going with the flow, of milk fermenting and matting into curds, of working with the grain of wood in turning the arms and legs of a kitchen chair. It also meant synchronizing with the rhythms of ones own and others bodies when working together mowing the meadow, threshing grain or finishing a quilt. The modern clock installed a metronomic pace at the heart of industrial-age work, complementing the ideas of external work management and the shift of work from tools to machines. Increasingly, knowledge involved the skills required to operate these machines and was less integral to the creative process of work itself. Theres another thread in this story. Its not just knowledge that was increasingly stripped from the body, the social process involved in knowing was too. Again a number of things contributed to this, including the mimetic importance of printed texts, with authoritative objectivity exemplified in the abstract alphabetic characters. The de-throning of the body as the site of authoritative knowledge was an important corollary, and itself got a boost when instruments like the telescope debunked what the senses maintained to be true(e.g., that the sun revolved around the earth). Since then, the microscope, x-ray, ultrasound and MRI have pushed past the frontiers of what the body can know directly through the senses, extending the realm of objectified facts; this has resulted in dependency on fact-finding knowledge systems and technologies, including the scale and pace associated with them. This eclipsing of the body helped foster another transformation too: the very idea that the idea of things, people and experience should be privileged over things people and experience in and of themselves. And so, instead of people telling their stories and, in dialogue with others, coming to agree on the common sense of a situation, we get abstract ideas and data setsstatistical units in sociological categories, as sociologist of knowledge Dorothy Smith once archly put it. Moreoever, these units arent directly linked to social groups, and thus arent accountable to accurately represent their shared experience. Theyre linked instead to systems of official knowledge. There was a time element in this transformation too. Time as the dure of experience and attentive observation, and as the rhythms of representing this in storytelling and dialogue (including pauses as people listened and reflected, shifted to time as a series of moments of instrumental observation, which could be scaled up and accelerated. I can remember when this happened to me; I was finishing the study that would be published in 1981 as the best-selling Women and the Chip. Id been invited to make a preliminary presentation to a group of senior bureaucrats, after which I was asked if I could identify certain assumptions from what Id learned so far, do some computer modelling and project the possible impact on womens employment across the country. Well, of course I couldnt; the notion was fatuous and fraught with smoke and mirrors. I did it anyway. I came up with a projection of possibly one million women being unemployed, which got the headlines right across the country as I recall. Suddenly I was an expertthough in a discourse that was so large in scale my voice was lost. The debate turned into one about de-skilling/re-skilling rather than knowledge

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appropriation, loss of control and the need to negotiate restructuring. I tried to say, wait! Youve got it wrong! I tried to say what it meant as lived reality, but I was summarily ignored. The agenda, informed by data sets, became one of skills training and literacy for the new Knowledge Economyall abstractionsand there was nothing I could do about it, except climb on board if I wanted more than my initial fifteen minutes of fame. I had had a vague sense that I was losing it when I complied with the bureaucrats suggestion. Doing so meant losing touch with the women Id talked to, for example, in Ste. Agathe, Quebec, whod lost their jobs as telephone operators and had indignantly recounted to me their having been each given a fifteen-cent plastic rose at a farewell (sandwich) luncheon as a parting token of the companys esteem. I worried that, in embracing the quick scale-up of my message through computer modelling, I was distorting the message. More importantly, I was losing the empathy and solidarity Id felt when I heard these stories. Well, duh! I realize now. Not only did I strip away the storied knowledge embedded in these women and their experience. I turned the women into computer-modelled data projections, and the statistics became the reality I was most quoted on. It was a reality completely outside of the womens world, and it was also outside my own embodied ways of knowing, which included my own empathy, my own interpretation of the facts. By then, this other story had accelerated into widespread public knowledge as my study went through multiple print runs, turning me into an expert, even a star on the speaking circuit, as a friend of a friend put it. Which kept me busy chasing more success, more grants, more publishing contracts. So I didnt pay much attention to what I was losingand whether it might include my own authentic voice, my own capacity for accountability as a knowing, knowledge-creating person. Im going on at some length with this belated mea culpa because it relates to the dilemma many of us find ourselves in trying to critique the global knowledge economy and society as social reality, as human experience, in ways that are answerable to the people inside that experience. To rework the Jarawa Tribesmans observation, the dilemma is twofold: the knowledge were producing is, to a large extent, outside and is not doing justice to the Tsunami of social change going on. Its also outside us, in that all the data-mapping of outsourced jobs, non-standard work, generic skills and core competencies places the discussion outside the realm of embodied, experienced reality, outside of which solidarity or social justice becomes just another abstraction, if a glamorous Bono-branded one! Ironically, much of the critical research going on strikes me as almost a mirror image of the bias underpinning the global knowledge economy itself, its critical voice thereby neutralized in the process. There isnt space here to expound on my argument that the much-vaunted knowledge economy associated with globalized digital networks is centred in knowledge outside of people. Briefly, as I have argued elsewhere, it is a knowledge systems economyor to quote an Industry Canada document, it is a cyber economy (Gera, Lee-Sing and Newton 1998: 61). The axis of the new economy is knowledge and information networks, instantly interconnectable, inter-operable operating systems, software and databases, with a host of patents and copyrights linking ownership and control of all this to corporations instead of to people deploying their own skills and interpreting their own knowledge in different contexts. Its an immaterial economy, built on and of abstractions, and operating on the scale, scope and speed of which only abstractions

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are capable. Thats its bias, operating systemically through corporate globalizations webwork of data networks. In other words, the abstract standardization associated with industrialization isnt giving way to something more holistic at the core of the new economy. Its a triumph of industrialized prescription, with only a patina of customized choice. In fact, I would argue that the work model of isolated, standardized, computer-defined and managed work, dramatically exemplified in customer-contact centres everywhere from rural Canada to rural India, could become the prototype for post-industrial work, if the globes dominant corporations that are currently driving the globalization agenda have their way. We arent talking about knowledge and ways of knowing that are an extension of knowing people, or work teams, but the reverse. Increasingly, skills training involves adjusting people to working as the extensions of knowledge and informationprocessing systems. Moreover, this requires people to actively suppress their own knowledge and creativityeven, in accent neutralization efforts, their own culture. Its an exaggeration to consider these workers as the fleshy peripherals of knowledge systems, but the hyperbole helps to flag the bias at work, in which much of peoples spontaneous human agency is amputated. To use Marshall McLuhans metaphor of technology as simultaneously extensions and amputations (McLuhan 1964): bestpractices protocols and performance-to-specifications scripts turn people into extensions of global knowledge systems, while simultaneously suppressing and amputating their own authentic voice and agency.
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Many committed academics are trying to counter this bias; yet they themselves are prone to it, and its subtly amputating effects. The difficulty doesnt just lie in continuing to resist the dominant bias in the production of academic knowledge, which would mirror the disappearance of these people by turning them into numbers. This is the bias of positivism that many of us spend much of our time doing. The equally if not more treacherous dilemma is to resist a parallel amputation, effacement and disappearance of ourselves and our own humanity. In No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life (2005), I wrote about my own experience with the relentless pace of now. It gets under my skin and into my blood as a quick-click, go-go, multi-tasking workaholic-like frenzy I feel helpless to turn off or even to slow down. I wrote about staring at an empty coffee mug after at least an hour sorting, deleting and quick-responding to email, and having no sense of having even drunk the stuff, let alone savoured a single mouthful. Citing Hans Selye, I wrote about the anesthetizing effects of stress, not only as the speed of quick-click living sheers off the nerve endings, occluding the time for sober second thought (Selye 1956: 264; Menzies 2005). Equally, the anesthetization operates through the abstractions of the on-line medium-environment in which we are immersed, sometimes for hours on end, yet which offers nothing to engage the ear, the impulse to touch and be touched. I also reported on some research I did with the esteemed York University sociologist Janice Newson: a survey of academics time in the restructured and globally-wired universities of Canada. Although only a pilot version of this study has been completed so far, the results were consistent enough not only among the roughly one-hundred respondents, but also with the findings of a much larger study of stress among British academics, that we consider its results worth heeding. So Id like to end by talking a

bit about the survey and speculating about what this means in terms of academics ability to help society cope with the tsunamis of our time. The survey was mildly ambitious. We mapped how many hours academics are working, including at home evenings and weekends; we mapped the demands on their time, including new reporting requirements, the shift to self-serve administration as such tasks have migrated on line and been left to academics; the need to fundraise for research; rising expectations from students, administration and even colleagues locally and globally now that theoreticallythat is, in the realm of ideaspeople are available 24-7. Then we took the pulse of how this is affecting academics health, their relationships and the life of their minds. A sizeable number are suffering from headaches, insomnia, short-term memory loss and other symptoms of stress. Theyre also experiencing strained relations with colleagues, friends and family. More worrisome still, at least for what Im talking about here, they are losing a sense of presence within themselves and with others, as public intellectuals. For example, 58 per cent reported that their ability to stay focused on their work had decreased, and 42 per cent reported that their susceptibility to being distracted by all the information and communication coming at them had increased. A startling 65 per cent reported that their ability to follow through on informal, personal/professional commitments (possibly off line and off campus in the community) had decreased. As well, 57 per cent said that they felt like they were reacting, not acting on my own initiative on occasion, and another 19 per cent said they felt this way frequently. Forty-seven per cent feel as though theyre fighting to keep control on occasion and another 20 per cent feel that way frequently. A significant minority (28 per cent) identified with the phrase I cant slow down enough to be in touch with myself and my innermost thoughts and, in the same proportion, the statement Everybody I know is too busy to just talk. As well, even while most reported feeling well connected to colleagues, students and friends, a troubling minority (34 per cent) reported feeling isolated. As a kind of summing up, they were asked to consider Marcel Prousts lament for a quality of being in time that allowed for deep memory association. Forty-one per cent saying that their capacity for this level of original/creative thinking had decreased. To give you a brief taste of the follow-up interview comments, a professor of English described sitting at her computer with several windows open at once and simultaneously having new emails signaling on her screen. So you have all these things going on, and in my mind it is almost the perfect match for attention deficit disorder. By the time you are a couple of hours into your email you have lost it. Youre skimming, fragmenting. Your life is so fragmented. All these emails are comingget back to me before my meeting. The findings are complex and even contradictory at times, and weve addressed some of that complexity in other writings. Here, I have brought together a few results that pertain to the theme Im addressing here: namely knowledge and knowing that is outside versus inside, attuned to the pulse of lived reality. I think that the findings of our study, and others like it, deserve to be considered in this light. All of the points Ive just touched on, from susceptibility to being distracted to not following through on personal priorities and even feeling isolated while simultaneously plugged in to the world, suggest a dangerous amputation of academics capacity to think for themselves, to know originally and creatively by taking in new data, new observations,

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and interpreting them in light not just of the latest knowledge systems but deep memory and intuitive connections. Anesthetization, disconnection, dissociation, these words could be used here too. It leaves me the worry that, as academics lose touch with themselves, lose that ballast of thinking both inwardly and in ongoing dialogue with trusted colleagues, the thinking and knowing they do could end up more centred outside of themselves, in the latest data and information-processing systems. They (we?) could become dependent on knowledge systems and related ways of establishing whats real that are outside, vested in global-scale technologies and quick-click techniques, instead of on ways of knowing borne out of engaged observation, reflection and dialogue with others. I worry that academics could have eyes but not see, ears but not hear as the social and political equivalent of tsunamis come crashing up the beach. This isnt inevitably in our stars, or in the cards. Its in our destiny to read the trends, identify the biases and do something. I suggest we need to restore balance in what we consider knowledge and how we go about creating and accrediting knowledge. We need balance in scale, scope and pace, so that participatory, embodied ways of knowing carry equal weight with those associated with global knowledge systems. So that our collective knowledge and ways of naming and knowing whats real are directly related and accountable to the realities of people struggling to live in peace, health and stability on a planet which itself is struggling to live in peace, health and stability.
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Note This essay began as a speech to the Knowledge Economy symposium, Queens University, March 4, 2005. References Franklin, Ursula. 1990. The Real World of Technology. Montreal: CBC Enterprises. . 1999. The Real World of Technology (revised). Toronto: Anansi Press. Gera, S., C. Lee-Sing and K. Newton. 1998. The Emerging Global Knowledge-Based Economy: Trends and Forces. Ottawa: Industry Canada: KBES Pilot Project. McLuhan, Marshall. [1964] 2003. Understanding Media: the extensions of man, edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press. . 1994. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. Boston: MIT Press. Menzies, Heather. 2005. No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. . 1981. Women and the Chip. Montreal: Institute for Research in Public Policy. . 1999. Digital Networks: The Medium of Globalization and the Message. Canadian Journal of Communications (24) 4. Morris, William. 1993. Art & Society. Boston: Georges Hill. Selye, Hans. 1956. The Stress of Life. Toronto: McGraw Hill. Smith, Adam. [1776] 1976. The Wealth of Nations, edited by R. H. Campbell et al. Oxford: Claredon Press. . 1937. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House.

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