The Asymmetry of Knowledge
And How Lack Generates What We Seek
We have heard it before: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” And then there is the question, “Do you really want to know?”, asked when someone feels that what they know may unsettle or harm us in some way. These statements lead us to consider what kinds of psychic risks are involved in the development of knowledge. What kinds of social sacrifices are made for knowledge, or for approaching new states that give rise to different forms of knowing? How does the inherent asymmetry of not knowing produce conditions for new forms of knowledge?
To approach these questions, it may help to reorient not knowing towards an understanding of lack as a spatial opening through which “the confused sway of empathic perceptions”[1] becomes generative within psychic process. The phrase “I know something you don’t” also comes to mind. Each of us knows many things others do not, yet knowing and awareness do not always seem to equate to knowledge. What, then, is knowledge? Is it some elevated procedure or object accessible only to certain people? Perhaps it is something less grand: a way of knowing attuned to the specific phenomena of an encounter. Let us consider bodied knowledge to demystify how knowing takes form and becomes connective.
The Mundane Conditions of Knowledge Transmission
Imagine entering a body of water—an ice-cold river. Perhaps we have reached it after hiking through the Sierra foothills. The sun is beating on our skin, and it is a dry 86 degrees. We feel that heat, itself a form of environmental knowledge that prompts us to apply sunscreen, put on a hat, and drink more water. We look towards a fork of the American River as it gushes by 50 feet away, our perception offering spatial knowledge that helps us navigate the terrain and approach the water.
You walk over and put your feet in the water. The cold is shocking; you let out a small gasp of surprise. As you edge further in, you begin to grow accustomed to its temperature.
Your friend, five feet behind you, learns something of the cold through your response: your raised shoulders, your upper body pulling away, and that first gasp. They register something about your contact with the water. Knowledge is transmitted in ways that do not rely on words alone. A bodied and affective contact opens new states which were unlike what occurred before for both of you.
One might not think of this scenario as inherently asymmetrical or significant in any way. Yet through encountering the water and registering its temperature in your physical response, you acquire an attuned environmental knowledge that your friend, who has not yet entered the river, does not share in the same way. Could this transmission prepare your friend differently for the cold? Could it also generate another kind of connective experience between you?
Your friend enters, grabs your hand, and you brace together, tightening your fingers around each other’s as you grow accustomed to the cold. The encounter opens new kinds of knowledge, prompting you to lean on one another through your shared physical reactions. Without this transmission and response, your experience of entering the water together might have unfolded differently.
Specialised Connective Forms
Let us consider knowledge that becomes even more specialised. Theoretical physicist Sara Walker conveys something of how her physics practice alters her experience: “It’s weird when you do theoretical physics, because I think it literally changes the structure of your brain and you see the world differently, especially when you’re trying to build new abstractions.”[2] We need not understand every formula or calculation Walker works with to receive something of the changes she describes. Her account, even in this brief phrase, opens a kind of psychic approach to her knowledge, allowing us to imagine how it may alter relations between the body and its environment, making previously inaccessible ways of knowing available.
Walker describes a “transition in possibility spaces” through which one might “actually see life in terms of this depth in time, this depth in symmetries of objects, in terms of chiral symmetries or this assembly structure.” She continues: “But getting past this boundary that’s not very deep in that space requires life.”[3] Thinking and sensing with her account, we can begin to imagine the cells that comprise our bodies and the histories of their formation across deep time. What conditions in their earliest generations led to the complex exchanges through which we are biologically constituted and sustained in relation to our environment and one another? What becomes available to us is not necessarily the same knowledge Walker develops through physics, but a way of approaching temporal dimensions by resonating with what she communicates of her experience. Imagination becomes another bridge towards knowing, opening possibilities for inquiry without requiring that our forms of knowledge coincide.
Following these spaces that open anew, let us consider mitochondria, specialised cellular components that “sense and respond to endogenous and environmental inputs. They integrate that information through dynamic, network-based physical interactions and diffusion mechanisms, and they also produce output signals that tune the functions of other organelles and systemically regulate all of our physiology.”[4] Scales of matter change, as does questions of chronology when approaching the mitochondrial attunement described by JudyAnne McNamara as another opening into the temporal and connective possibilities of life. I bring this account of mitochrondrial drive to sense and respond next to psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger’s notion of “endless connectivity.” Through Ettinerg’s discussion of cellular continuity in amoebae and her reworking of the cellular lamella, Ettinger proposes a life-drive, bringing a psychic dimension to questions of continuity and specialsied forms of connectivity. This offers a further direction for considering what may become possible through connection without dissolving difference. Her account opens towards an ethics of relation through “allianc[es] between that which is I and non-I.” Here, she asks us to “think about differences, differentiating-in-jointness, not symbiosis but not rejection or abjection.”[5]
A Risk to Reach
All around and within us, there is potential for knowledge assembly, if I may call it that, attentive to contingency and the specific conditions of endless encounters. Its connective qualities may allow bridges to form through “aesthetic categories that provide genetic conditions or new becomings-with objects.”[6] But what do we risk in making these connections? Not knowing may unsettle a condition we once believed determined what was possible, including how we understood ourselves.
To speak from less familiar dimensions of sensitivity is also to risk an asymmetry: I offer something you may not have encountered, yet I cannot necessarily walk you through every condition from which it arose. Similarly, knowing something idiosyncratic can invite curiosity, but it can also organise authority. In intuitive work and subtler forms of knowledging, this asymmetry may intensify when the knowledge transmitted arises through psychic processes or experiences others cannot readily access. That distance may itself become an imagined or real condition of authority, reinforced through social expectations and imagined roles that subtly shape the asymmetry between receiver and transmitter, making it difficult to distinguish the specificity of an encounter from the claims made on its behalf.
Here, attention to the fantasies that gather on either side may support more ethical forms of knowledge transmission and make its risks easier to recognise: the belief that the person transmitting knows more than they do, or that receiving their account will grant an identical access to what becomes known. What is shared may resonate without being encountered in the same way, suggesting how bridges accumulate and become altered through signification and transmission. Yet the risk in this work involves more than misunderstanding or the reassurance of agreement; it also concerns how we position ourselves in relation to one another through what we claim to know.
To follow this tension and its risks further, let us return to the analytic encounter. The analyst occupies the imagined position of the subject-supposed-to-know, a supposition that engages both participants. This asymmetry may ignite the analytic work, opening possibilities that exceed—and alter—the real or imagined positions from which they began. Marie-Hélène Brousse’s discussion of transformations in analysis opens a question about how both participants may be altered through the relation built over time. Here, connection becomes a condition of change, reshaping how each can encounter the other and unsettling positions once thought secure. I bring this into the inquiry to consider how asymmetries, whether imagined or socially agreed, may remain fluidic rather than necessarily harmful or limiting. Their possibilities may lie in how one comes to find oneself within the relation, through changing ethical approaches to connecting with the other. Brousse’s account of a zone described as “random and inconsistent,” and of meaning being unsettled through equivocation, helps us approach what may emerge when one form of knowing no longer fixes the evolving terms of the encounter.[7]
A question can open a condition of reception and address through which what was previously known becomes reorganised. Like entering the river, this may involve a change in the temperature of our knowing, a shift in temperament as we grow more able to remain with uncertainty. We need not feel the same cold or become accustomed to it at the same pace to offer one another a hand. What becomes possible between us may arise precisely because our experiences do not coincide.
Knowledge, then, doesn’t need to be magnificent or inaccessible. Its possibilities may lie in increasingly concentrated attention to how learning changes the conditions from which we meet. Knowing, not knowing, and the process of knowledging become conditions of relational change, opening something previously undiscovered in the space between I and non-I. To remain there with care is to allow knowledge to become connective without requiring that the encounter resolve into something either of us can fully possess.
NOTES
[1] Matthew David Segall, Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead(Revelore Press, 2023), 173.
[2] Sara Walker, “Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens,” interview by Lex Fridman, Lex Fridman Podcast, episode 433, June 13, 2024, YouTube video, 21:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwhTfyX9J34.
[3] Ibid., 59:21.
[4] JudyAnne McNamara, interview by Eugénie Krüger, “Ep 235: Latest Research in Homeopathy,” Homeopathy Hangout, YouTube video, posted by Eugénie Krüger Homeopathy, December 20, 2023, 15:51–16:21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfh6T8hqte8&t=951s.
[5] Bracha L. Ettinger, “Life Drive and the Feminine,” lecture for Lacan in Scotland, November 25, 2021, YouTube video, posted March 9, 2022, 27:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFPfzVGHIk&t=1634s.
[6] Segall, Crossing the Threshold, 173.
[7] Marie-Hélène Brousse, The Feminine: A Mode of Jouissance, trans. Janet Rachel (Lacanian Press, 2021), 66.
