How then should we approach a reading of Riddley Walker as a warning against the pursuit of knowledge that ends up being exploited for maligned purposes? Certainly, Riddley Walker and his people might regard these warnings one way (by eschewing the pursuit of all forms of systematic knowledge),
and we need not follow them in such a universal rejection - even as we try to understand it from their point of view. However, as readers of the novel, as
people who it might be said, are in the midst of certain potentially apocalyptic trends politically, culturally and ecologically, do the warnings have any use
for us? How can we begin to make sense of this? Is it possible to articulate what we might call the phenomenology of the pursuit of power/knowledge in
some of its problematic/dangerous aspects? This phenomenology would include the following:
. What does this pursuit of power/knowledge look like? W/hat would be an example of it?
• How can it be described?
• What exactly are the problematic aspects of it?
• Is the problem in what forms of power/knowledge are pursued or in how it is pursued?
• How might our understandings of ourselves and our world be implicated in all of this?
• How do we experience the problem of problematic pursuits of power/knoweldge in our own lives?