'KNOWLEDGE' -- "informs-forms-transform" CORNELL WEST

Cornel West on knowledge
Uploaded by dropping_knowledge

Sorry about it, I will carry on the previous talk after this one; I came across Cornell West so I had to open my keyboard here—although, it is still related to the previous discussion…

“...informs, forms, and transform…”

I’d like to extent Cornell West’s idea of ‘Knowledge’ here on the basis of the above temporal sequences between ‘inform-form-transform’ yet also circular in the sense that we can interpret these notions simultaneously. As I was saying in the bottom about the idea of ‘re-presentation’ and the temporality upon which it is understood as well as which it informs in a vice versa sense of understanding, we might assume for the time being that ‘re-presentation’ as ‘knowledge’ is couched within a certain vision—and as he asserts:

“…vision is rooted within a certain both analysis and as well as certain kinds of moral sensibility, so if I were to give the world ‘knowledge’, it would be ‘knowledge’ couched in a larger wisdom, a wisdom rooted in love and compassion—a love and compassion driven by a fight for justice for others, a fight for justice for the poor, for working people, for women, for peoples of colour, gay brothers, lesbian sisters…all of those who are so readily rendered invisible in the world in which we live. And that ‘knowledge’ is more than just information, but it’s an ‘information’ that is inseparable from transformation, so that it not simply informs but it forms and transforms who we are…”

He states in the beginning he doesn’t believe that ‘knowledge’ comes in the form of pieces—something which I cannot agree with but that’s not to say that it does. I think therefore—being influenced by various notions other than my own culture—it might be more viable for me to discuss or think of ‘knowledge’ first of all as an assemblage of different pieces or elements not necessarily originating from the same dimension of a certain given time and space understanding but emerge even from opposing directions. ‘Knowledge’ here in close relation to the idea of ‘re-presentation’—whether through art, music, or whatever—is an assemblage of various elements drawn from different realities and even from imaginary constructions of reality already embedded in the ‘space’ constituted by one’s own ‘reality’. That it is—knowledge—a conjuncture which materially manifests an instant amongst collections of implicit realisations directly connected and influenced by what it is that the individual is surrounded with. Such that ‘knowledge’ in this form is a result of aesthetic experiences with both transcendental as well as immediate aspects of all that we experience as well as what is put in front of us—whether art, music, texts, or whatever.
That ‘knowledge’ is a product manifesting instances of implicit overlaps and intersections between the different elements and dimensions of what we understand as life.

‘Re-presentation’ then as ‘knowledge’ might be seen here in this blog as an inherent and historical process orientated towards informing—which utilises elements already in existence largely—through certain ways or means of formulating the images to carry out this informing act whereby the effect of such process informs a state of transformation in what it is the ‘artist’, ‘author’, ‘singer’, ‘rapper’ and etc. is a part of—whether it is culturally, economically, politically, and so on. Yet, such organism is always already from the outset a simultaneous and circular event or being resistant to external definition…

2bcont…