Participatory Knowledge

Various quotes explaining participatory knowing

Quotes
Participatory knowing refers to knowing how to act in the “agent-arena” environment. It is simultaneously one of the most basic and most profound kinds of knowing. One way to think about participatory knowledge is to consider the difference between being in a state of confusion versus a state of flow. Flow is when you are in a groove and feel a natural “dance” between your actions and the environment, and an example of participatory knowledge.

This concerns a shared, symbiotic, identity-based knowing. There is an inherent degree of internalisation (rather than mere ownership) of object by subject. It is money becoming part of the same pool of a human’s resources, as their intelligence, network, bodily abilities, life expectancy, etc. – one of many resources all aimed at a single goal. The classic example is the knowledge of what it is like to be a parent. It is a transformative experience, that cannot be known in advance by any amount of propositions, mastery of any procedure, nor even understanding of a parental worldview from either the parent’s or the world’s perspective. Because the act of becoming a parent changes the person doing the knowing, the only way to know what it’s like is to be, or rather become, one.

More crudely, a pen takes on a use only when there is a human hand there to pick it up and write with it, and a human-pen hybrid is fundamentally different to a human and a pen side by side; the act of writing with the pen is fundamental to neither human nor pen. Our participatory relationship with money is incessant. Our interactions with it are constantly shaping our identity and the environment in which that identity is finding its way. And the money-environment in turn shapes us.