A new book from the curiosity that is academia has emerged. It is The Epistemic Violence of Mathematics by Carla-Julie Kather, who bills herself as a “Sexual Violence Prevention, Feminist Theory and Neurodiversity Studies” expert.
Being something of a mathematician myself, I thought it would be of interest to see how my profession was epistemically violent. Maybe, I thought to myself, I could learn to be even more brutal and violent in the puzzles I bash readers with.
Kather writes, “At the core of this thesis lies the question of Mathematics and my belief that what Wynter terms the Man-centric world is always the Mathematics-centric world too”. This Wynter is Sylvia, a retired professor from Stanford in one of their Studies departments, who, that university boasts, “left an indelible mark on Black Studies and postcolonial thought.” Perhaps like the mark of being stabbed.
Anyway, men, you see, have a nasty habit of producing more “bodies”, and producing far more “bodies” than women, that can do mathematics well. This isn’t fair. And, by implication, ought to be. The problem must be twofold: men and math. The academy, infamously, is confused about what a man is. But maybe our author has a clearer notion of what math is. After all, she wrote an entire book about it. Here is her definition:
Mathematics is therefore a notion of thinking and a mode of thinking that forms modes of being. The contents of Mathematics as an Image of Thinking, as well as the consequences of Mathematics, are epistemic violence because they actualize hegemonic notions of Rationality and the Human.
I’m not sure whether this includes “1 + 1 = 2” and the like, or only does so only in regimes which favor “patriarchal-colonial-capitalist witch hunts”. That passage, however, is as close as she comes to defining what math is.
As we learn from the title, Mathematics (we she always italicizes) is epistemic violence. Thus math “enables and legitimizes the ongoing epistemicide (the killing of knowledge) of Indigenous mathematics.” And what is “Indigenous mathematics”? She never says, not in the entire book.
Epistemic violence, she writes, is, “the silencing of knowledge formed from marginalized positions or the silencing of knowledge that does not accord with hegemonic systems.” It is also this:
Epistemic violence is a distinct form of violence, but not one that can be separated from other forms of violence. Epistemic violence continuously unfolds its [sic] precisely through its interwovenness with other forms of violence. Throughout this chapter [two] sexual violence will function as a case study to illustrate the interwovenness of epistemic violence with other forms of violence.
So what, then, is “sexual violence”?
Sexual violence is a violence that grows from within the world that the Mathematics-Rationality-Human continuum builds. Sexual violence, as I understand it, is a practice of excluding as a being from the realm of the human.
And who are the biggest victims of this form of sexual violence? Can you guess?
Women are subjected to sexual violence especially often precisely because they are less-human than men in the world of the Mathematics-Rationality-Human continuum because their thinking-being is less accounted for in the continuum-based notion of the human. Women of color are subjected to even more sexual violence because their thinking-being is even less accounted for in the human birthed by the continuum.
And don’t even get her started on “autistic women”.
After reading this, maybe you were as confused as I was about this thing called “epistemic violence”. She must have sensed this in readers, because she late in the book clarifies the concept:
Epistemic violence is a living body, and its heart is the exclusive human–the human birthed by the Mathematics-Rationality-Human continuum. This exclusive human is both a notion and a mode of thinking-being, which builds a continuum with other notions and modes as well as with other images of thinking-being, namely Rationality and Mathematics.
That clears it up for me.
I could not discover, anywhere in the book, anything resembling an argument. You are welcome to check for yourself (the book is free online, at the top link), but all of it reads exactly like the quotes here. One massive word jumble with no hard definitions of anything, and no justification of any conclusion. We are left only with a certain sense that somebody has once done a great injustice to Kather, but we don’t know what. My guess is that she failed her calculus course and was none too happy about it.
Now if this were only Kather and her odd little book, it would be a small matter and an occasion for a few small jokes. Of course, it is not only her. It is a wide swath of academia, with a gaggle of lady and other Victim professors going on and on about “epistemic injustice” and “epistemic violence”. Like this, this, and this: also peruse the book’s bibliography which goes on at depressing length. The “violence”, so far as I can tell, applies only to subjects which require no small degree of intellectual prowess, and in which these ladies and Victims don’t on average fare as well as (white and east Asian) men. Which isn’t fair.
It would be unfair, too, if I let myself instead of Kather have the last word. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Carla-Julie Kather:
Putting final words to the matter of the Mathematics-Rationality-Human Continuum or to our multitudes of wild thinking-being is an impossible task. It is impossible, because this thesis is supposed be a small part of movements of re-inventing what it is to think and be – mathematically and otherwise.
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The real issue with this is that it is an attempted justification for the studies departments to take over other subjects. If it was just a bunch of people spinning their theories, that wouldn’t be much of a problem, because mathematicians could just ignore them. But math is no longer an autonomous subject; it is subject to the bureaucrats and if the bureaucrats believe what the studies academics say, well, so much the worse for the mathematicians.
Now, it would be possible for people to simply work on mathematics or any other subject as an amateur, and do things informally, the way it used to be. But that would have to mean supporting each other and building upon what was good from the past, not saying everything everybody else did in the past was bad and one’s fellow amateurs are all dumb. In other words, for a network of amateurs to work, they have to be primarily motivated by the subject, not prestige or ego.
If that happens, it would be great, but then the other obstacle is the attempted takeover or destruction of mathematics by megacorporations and governments. In the form of so-called AI. The attitude is that no one needs to learn math or no one needs mathematicians because the machine is smarter (supposedly) or that mathematicians will just become LLM prompt functionaries and then they are just interchangeable widgets and can be swapped out at will. They are already trying to do this with computer programmers. It is true that it can’t really be done; you can’t actually replace knowledge and thinking with elaborate statistical modelling, but it doesn’t mean they can’t cause a lot of problems in the meantime.
So, unfortunately, society is no longer larger made up of autonomous units; it is was these kinds of things would not be nearly as much of an issue.