During the process the research question transformed: from a search for invisibilized knowledge to an open question about how to define what’s knowledge and what’s not.

In the “platform to become a platypus” activated through the project, knowledge is something that needs as if; a game in pretending that something is real when we know it’s not, a procedure by absurdity, “a grammar of possibility ” or a grammar of the hypothetical instead of “a grammars of pronouncement”. (Halberstam, Queer Art of Failing)

The “platypus’ realm of knowledge” is made of minor knowledge of the infra-ordinary in life: “a thicket of subjugated knowledge that sprouts like weeds among the disciplinary forms of knowledge, threatening always to overwhelm the cultivation and pruning of the intellect with mad plant life […] These forms of knowledge have not simply been lost or forgotten; they have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual or ‘insufficiently elaborated’. Foucault calls them ‘naïve knowledge, hierarchically inferior knowledge, knowledge that is below the required level of erudition or scientificity’ this is what we mean by knowledge from below. (Halberstam, Queer Art of Failing)

The “knowledge of the platypus” is not serious or better is serious and rigorous in not being serious and in aiming to the impossible as we find in Habermast text as if he wrote to describe what we did: “the desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. . Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.”

“Platypus’ knowledge” is against truth or against the truth as norm and imperative, against the claim that knowledge comes from one truth. Anti-truth (and not post-truth) is the opportunity of giving up on the intention of grabbing the complexity of knowledge, a “giving up on mastery” (Halberstam), a getting lost instead of finding our way, an unlearning “to untrain ourselves so that we can read the struggles and debates back into questions that seem settled and resolved.” (Halberstam)

“Platypus’ knowledge” doesn’t need a process of understanding; understanding is out of discussion. Against the legibility which is, as writes James Scott said “a condition of manipulation” (Seeing like a State, 1999), illegibility may in fact bring us somewhere else: “we may want new rationales for knowledge production, different aesthetic standards for ordering or disordering space, other modes of political engagement than those conjured by the liberal imagination. We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers.” (Halberstam)

So starting from an as if, through a path of possible, embracing ‘disqualified’ knowledge, without being serious and with great stupidity, remaining on the side of anti-truth, jumping between disciplines, without understanding and keep on making questions, the Platypus is an act of worlding.