Conclusion: Learned Ignorance and Performative Unknowing: Unselfing the Self, Unworlding the World

Abstract

In the conclusion, Chambers embarks on a trans historical comparison between the negative mysticism of medieval theologian Hildegard of Bingen, especially the visions in her Book of Divine Works, and the interactive website Paris the Invisible City composed in 1998 by French social theorists Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant. The parallels between Latour and Hildegard are striking, in that they are both concerned to embrace the world on its cosmic scale through the closure of the specific, insistent that the stuttering aporia of unknowing is the kind of knowledge that is the most illuminating in understanding human relations and the structure of the world. In effect, they create a practical apophaticism that constantly negates both self and world as arbiters and centers of knowledge and experience.