Abstract
We are in the midst of multiple quantitative-cultural revolutions produced by the accelerating coevolution of capital, code, and cognition. Spoofs, hoaxes, conspiracies, and paranoia proliferate along with genuine advances in legitimate scientific and sociocultural inquiry. Matthew Hannah provides essential guidance to help us navigate dangerous spaces of multidimensional confusion, in which we must work to build and maintain solidarities of science and critical inquiry as intergenerational projects of patience, trust, and forgiveness.
Matthew Hannah has given us a wonderful gift. In a gripping narrative with incisive analytical rigor, ‘Taking “Nonsense” Seriously’ (Hannah, 2026) helps us cope with the damage inflicted by recent scholarly hoaxes, which have been enrolled into systematic, well-funded attacks on universities, academic freedom, and the legitimacy of research across the social sciences and humanities.
Hannah's eloquent narrative – especially the inclusion of Neil Smith's sleep manifesto – elicits hallucinogenic flashbacks to a long history of playful pranks in our field. Smith's conception of sleep as transgressive strategic counterhegemony echoes Stribirsky and Gaile's (1991) ‘Geography of Furniture Mobility’ (which cites Ed Sofa's work on the Ottoman Empire and other seats of power), and Peter Gould's (1985) cartoon of the Neanderthal toxic masculinity of Quantifactus kidnapping Geographia and dragging her across the Fluvial Calculus while a heartbroken Qualifactus cries on the shore. So too with the legendary spoof ad by Clark grad students promoting a new, radical GIS: MARX/INFO (with its powerful Random Jargon Generator and a color palette with 256 shades of red) brought to you by ESRI, Epistemological Socialist Revolution, Inc. Yet beyond the self-indulgentboomer/Gen X nostalgia for Lingua Franca as the bygone TMZ/Gawker for the academy, Hannah takes us into a dangerous terrain, where the implications of deception have deadly serious consequences. The Sokal ‘quantum gravity’ hoax was a part of an epochal shift as reactionary operatives learned enough postmodernism to design, install, and operate cognitive assembly lines in capitalist factories of fragmentation (compare Harvey, 1992 with Wylie, 2019).
As automation continued the geographically selective deindustrialization of material commodity production, the industrialization of human consciousness allowed operatives to hijack the lineage of critical theory from the Frankfurt School to Lyotard as a means of mobilizing language and representation to substitute appearance for reality (see Smith, 2011). It is no coincidence that the media tours of the Grievance Studies’ authors – notwithstanding their press release presenting themselves as ‘left-leaning liberals’ – included long, friendly chats with alt-Right heroes like Jordan Peterson (8.59 million subscribers on YouTube alone). Once audiences enter that ecosystem, it's just a click, thumb-swipe, or auto-recommend/auto-play flip over to Joe Rogan or Alex Jones or Steve Bannon's War Room (Klein, 2023). Butterflies, hurricanes, and all that. That's where the performative speech acts of COVID conspiratorial entrepreneurs tap into audience hierarchies of enraged engagement that can be quantified, in the spirit of geography's dalliance with mid-twentieth century cybernetics and General Systems Theory, as log(Views) = 7.458–0.02130 (Rank) + ε which, across correlated views of 427 million, yields R2 = 0.93 (Daniels et al., 2023).
Navigating today's cybernetic mosaic of epistemic cultures, Hannah develops a rigorous epistemological infrastructure that allows the destructive intentions of Sokal's social physics and the Grievance Studies punk’d attack on Gender, Place, and Culture to become part of positive endeavors of scientific integrity and sincere efforts toward social, spatial, and environmental justice. Here's how I understand Hannah's logic. First, the relations between who authors are, what goals they pursue, and the knowledge they produce is contextual and contingent. We are constantly cherry-picking sense from nonsense. We can learn something from everything. We can find valuable insights in the work produced by Sokal and the Grievance Studies authors, regardless of their intentions. We can calculate a correlation coefficient without endorsing Francis Galton's eugenics. We can read Foucault or listen to the music of Michael Jackson (or Drake?) without committing real or rumored pedophilia. Second, the most serious hoaxes require perpetrators to immerse themselves so deeply into the ideas, assumptions, and methods of their targets that they become trapped in a learning process that literally transforms caricatures into forms of criticism that more closely resemble legitimate scholarship. This dynamic – which Hannah calls the ‘extrusion of nonsense’ – is an extraordinary alchemy. The possibility that we can change negative acts like public shaming into constructive, positive contributions is inspiring. C.P. Snow – as well as Smith, Gould, and others whose authorial intentions can only be discerned through posthumous multimedia fragments of their speech acts and writing, or the memories of those whom they influenced – would love Hannah's achievement. These previous generations of authors might even regard Hannah's constructive ‘extrusion of nonsense’ approach as a new kind of positivism.
‘Positivism’ has become a strange, provocative word over the past half-century, so you might be tempted to laugh, roll your eyes, or shake your head. Me too, and I wrote this shit. Please forgive me, but I’ve only been allowed 2000 provocations to comment on Hannah's masterpiece. Every time I re-read it from start to finish, I see new things I missed before, with new implications of how Hannah's ideas converse with multiple generations of geographers, feminists, linguists, queer theorists, physicists, Indigenous theorists, philosophers, postcolonial theorists, and innumerable other authors, literatures, and movements that continuously reproduce our evolutionary ontologies of embodied positionality and standpoint situated knowledges. Word limits – like constraints of time and space – necessitate forms of conversation as a cooperative process that yield linguistic tactics that can be demanding, obtuse, and vulnerable to unintentional misinterpretation or strategic manipulation. Words – and citations (Gould, 1999; Táíwò, 2022) – have different meanings for authors and audiences, and the alignments between positionality, intention, and value judgments now shift rapidly in ways that are simultaneously planetary (Elon's U.S. $44 billion acquisition of a chunk of the global attention span) and personalized to the neural scale (Kurzweil, 2024). When I use the word ‘positivism’, I envision a passion for scientific discovery and integrity coevolving with a radical love for the accelerating diversification of planetary urban humanity and socionatural spiritualities in all their kaleidoscopic, combinatoric manifestations of overwhelming beauty – but there's an asymptote of zero in the likelihood that such a bizarre assemblage of Raymond Williams-style keywords will have a similar constellation of meanings for the vanishingly small audience of humans who may encounter these scribblings in expanding algorithmic mirror-worlds (Gelertner, 1991) of code, capital, and cognition.
This is where I fell in love with Hannah all over again. My Renée Zellweger ‘you had me at hello’ moment was Hannah's (2001) conceptualization of ‘statistical citizenship’, and now, a quarter century on, Hannah's brilliant analysis culminates in a sacred, strategic commitment to moral and scientific inquiry. In the amorphous collective endeavor that Gibson-Graham famously called ‘The Project’, we must maintain humility – as well as patience and trust – to work across divides of expertise and specialization amid an ever-expanding cognitive-capitalist universe of information that obscures knowledge (Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017). Hannah provides a cognitive cartography to our current Cambrian explosion of agnotology, of data and discourse masquerading as reliable fact and stable meaning, where Zipf-Christaller-Berry hierarchies of language and material environments coevolve in the multidimensional fractals that led Gould – like Neil Smith – into daseinalysis. In the spirit of constructive critique, however, I would suggest that Hannah's emphasis on humility and trust in the individual, daily practices of everyday academic life is too modest, cautious, and optimistic – especially when paired with an acknowledgment that few in our field will embrace the laborious challenges of developing expertise across distinct epistemic cultures. Individual humility is important. Collectively, however, we must strengthen the capacity for serious expertise synthesized with epistemic pluralism if there is to be any hope of confronting today's monstrous infrastructure of industrialized deception, suspicion, confusion, and epistemic terror (see the mutation of campy queer data science fashionistas into MAGA network architectures, as narrated in the ‘We Fight Terror in Prada’ chapter of Wylie's (2019) memoir). The event horizons of the intricate, dynamic spaces of cybernetic cognitive capitalism help explain the seeming paradox of simultaneous advances in robotics, nanotechnology, and generative AI alongside infinitely adaptive memetic mutations of disinformation and conspiracy. These hybrid tessellations of idealism and materialism appear digital, but nonbinary analog continua alter the performativity of any binary code that circulates through the ever-faster-spinning dialectics of virtue/vice signaling (Táíwò, 2022) of communicating, embodied human consciousness. As individuals, Hannah is correct that we can read Sokal and the Grievance Studies articles in subversive ways. But if our reactions while listening to Pulitzer laureate Kendrick Lamar's brutalist binary ‘Not Like Us’ rap calling Drake a pedophile and a ‘colonizer’ are digitized, multiplied, and amplified to sufficient scale – five Grammys, a billion Spotify plays, a Super Bowl audience of a hundred million – the consequences in contradictory hierarchies of law include things like a federal defamation lawsuit blaming the song for a shooting that attorneys call ‘the 2024 equivalent of #pizzagate’. Charlamagne tha God calls the song ‘a cultural anthem’ that transcends race, musical genre, and geographical region – and yet it was a wicked-edited snippet of a few seconds of Charlamagne tha God's own shocked reaction to a decontextualized fragment of a Kamala Harris comment on trans health care that was woven into a Trump attack ad persuading enough Catholic Latina/o/x cisheteropatriarchal family-values voters to flip 12 of the 14 border counties of the Dems’ ‘Southern Blue Wall’ along the Rio Grande.
We are constantly getting lost in the ever-shifting coordinates of expanding multidimensional cognitive environments. In the first dozen years of this century, the share of the world's total volume of recorded information that was digitized – and thus subject to speedy circulation, correlation, and recombination – went from about a quarter to more than 98%. In these cognitive mirror-worlds, recurrent quantitative-cultural revolutions redraw frontier zones between scholarship and journalism, pop culture versus politics, cultural studies and political economy, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, empirical versus theoretical work, physical science and humanistic inquiry, and among multiple disciplines in ever more competitive institutional spaces of knowledge production. It is in these frontier zones where the criteria for expertise are most unstable and contested – and thus open for utopian possibilities or dystopian catastrophes. Half a century after Berry (1980) deployed physical science paradigms of long-term cultural adaptation as evolution to situate geography's positionality in the academic division of labor, our field remains vibrant yet insecure, a space of pluralistic, competing ‘organized fantasies’ of hope and mobilization in the shadow of more powerful disciplines and processes. The old 0/1 binary of C.P. Snow's two cultures is now an algorithmic, nonbinary, pluriversal superorganic (Duncan, 1980) of diverse epistemic cultures that, Hannah wisely cautions, has a ‘vast scope for mutual incomprehension’. Geographers, Hannah emphasizes, must maintain humility and trust to work across multiple divides. This means nurturing solidarity on the 99% where we agree while forgiving one another when the difference-production infrastructures of digitized false consciousness reveal betrayals on that last 1%. We need to trust each other as we make different decisions struggling to build expertise in those dynamic yet dangerous frontier zones that constitute the past, present, and future condition of this phenomenon called geography. Hannah's magnificent analysis is an essential guide in those ongoing challenges.
