confessing non-knowledge

It is likely that we each have a basic faith in a view about the way the world works, which derives from our early childhood experiences. I consider that my particular faith is a skeptical one. I am a skeptic by faith, ironically -- by virtue of a childhood faith.

Let us suppose that this relates to an adjustment mechanism, an innate one. Just as the eye dilates in darkness, to allow more light to enter it, and just as it contracts response to the brightest lights, to enable itself to see at all without being blinded, so my skepticism was founded in reaction to parental certainty.

My father is one who believes that no communication is necessary, not fundamentally, for the important facts of life are those that each of us already knows. Not to know something -- about any practical aspect of life -- is a sign of wilful self-deception, in his eyes. Or laziness. Each of us already knows all we need to know to get along in life. (I wonder to what degree this stance is derived from white colonial ideology about the nefarious lazy "other" who fails to understand how to be properly "civilised", and how much of it is merely Christian fundamentalism.)

Examples from my past are as follows: when my father hears a message from god, he knows somehow that all of us -- me and my siblings -- have heard it, too. He doesn't need to spell it out for us too much, but to watch and wait to see the degree to which we will fall inline, or punishment will ensue. Having to cope with this kind of erratic behaviour is what has given me my "sixth sense" in tracking the patterns of behaviour of others. One has to be able to predict the storm before it hits if one is to have any chance of surviving it at all.

My childhood 'faith', however, is one of skepticism -- and to the degree that my father knew for certain what we knew, I knew for certain that I didn't know what I was supposed to. The more he chimed from the rooves that I knew in a definite way what I was being punished for, the more I saw him as a monster, veiled in mystery.

I became more and more certain that it was not possible to communicate a fundamental thing -- the situated position of not knowing. Whereas certainty in knowing seemed to be everybody else's faith, I found more and more that my faith was oriented around a certainty regarding the impossibility of communicating my inability to know. I could not communicate this to my father -- ie. that I was not receiving, by any means, the same messages from "God" that he was. Later, my education about the world at large was found to be quite lacking. (Obviously, it was difficult to communicate with a parent whose manner of communication was punitive and decidely non-verbal, and so the sharing of important information about the world, especially about politics, was minimal.) So once again, as a young adult, I encountered difficulty, regarding the political sphere, in trying to communicate with those who were already certain about their places in the world, my inability to know.

Thus the inability to communicate non-knowledge became a core part of my experience, and reached the point on a practical level of being an informal faith -- which is to say an orientation towards the world, in and of itself.

I wonder whether Bataille's father had the same attitude towards him. A non-Catholic, (Bataille later converted to Catholicism in rebellion against him), perhaps he was nonetheless punitive and incommunicative -- so much so that it would later cause the adult Bataille to write reams and reams about the incommunicability of 'non-knowledge'.

I see a similar pattern in Marechera, whose old man died upon the railway tracks of history. A punitive parent, who is nonetheless filled with epistemological self-certainty, produces children who are epistemological skeptics to the core.

This feature of early upbringing may have had much to do with Marechera's disavowal of identity politics and its presumption to know you on the inside on the basis of your outside coloure. It is this epistemological skepticism of his that resonates most with me, and with my own life.