Ends of Knowledge

Bringing together an exciting group of knowledge workers scholars and activists from<br/>across fields this book revisits a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is<br/>the last or furthest end of knowledge? It is a book about why we do what we do and<br/>how we might know when we are done.<br/><br/>In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment disciplines<br/>were conceived as having particular ends both in terms of purposes and end-points.<br/>As we experience an ongoing shift to the knowledge economy of the Information Age <br/>this collection asks whether we still conceptualize knowledge in this way. Does an<br/>individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint? What do<br/>an experiment on a fruit fly a reading of a poem and the writing of a line of code have<br/>in common?<br/><br/>Focusing on areas as diverse as AI; biology; Black studies; literary studies; physics;<br/>political activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself contributors uncover a life<br/>after disciplinarity for subjects that face immediate threats to the structure if not the<br/>substance of their contributions. These essays - whether reflective historical eulogistic <br/>or polemical - chart a vital and necessary course towards the reorganization of<br/>knowledge production as a whole.