ABSTRACT
Data is a matter of seeing. And seeing is a matter of perspective. Without the senses or the tools that augment the senses, nothing can be seen. Without subjects expressing viewpoints from their perspectives to each other, data cannot be made publicly visible. Without public recognition, there is no data that can be evidence as a basis for understanding and explanation. But how is recognition organised? In Chapter 2, the God’s-eye and street-level views were described in relation to Spinoza’s concepts of power. This gives the possibilities of recognition by some all-defining master subject or by the contest of views dispersed in the multitude. In the egality of the multitude is the birthplace of politics, that is, the emergence of associations to lift individual interests into the combined efforts of cooperatives, gangs or other kinds of organisations. It is here too that there is the birthplace of the hatred of democracy, the plurality of views, that Rancière (2005) sees as an ever-present danger. Democracy is an object of hate for those who see it as undermining their claims to universality, their belief in some notion of the ‘good’ or their desire for privilege and wealth. For the poor, it is an object of hope. It is the place where old evidences of an uncontestable reality melt and explanations and understandings no longer hold. If in the multitude there is necessarily a plurality of perspectives, there can only be a unity, a society, a world, if there is some kind of reconciliation with the multiplicity of differences, or at least a sufficient range of differences. Even where a majority of viewpoints claim universality, as in the claim for equality, they do so in the face of and conflict with those who benefit from inequality. Each ‘side’ may seek knowledge to realise their interests, and they may seek a certain body of knowledge so that they never lose power over those objects that satisfy their interests. But: ‘No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of the whole. Thus the goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept; it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds’ (Adorno 1973: 14).
