Heuristic Knowledge and Rules of Thumb
Before we explore in detail how intellectuals in the literary sphere recount their knowledge of the Stasi, we need to outline what is meant by “heuristic” or “intuitive” knowledge. As explained in the introduction to this book, knowledge is both social and relational: it is not “out there” to be acquired by anyone with the right skills but constructed in a particular socio-cultural context and in relation to others. Relational knowledge is not sustained only (or even principally) through the use of language (textual or verbal). Knowledge is “what a person employs to interpret and act on the world,” but it includes “feelings (attitudes) as well as information, embodied skills as well as verbal taxonomies and concepts.”
1Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 1. In short, knowledge about the Stasi may not always have been explicit: certain behaviours and beliefs may have been practiced or developed seemingly “instinctively” or “intuitively.”
2Myers, Intuition. In fact, they were based on a not fully verbalised knowledge about how the MfS worked, how you should act to avoid an open confrontation, what could be said when and where and to whom, cues that indicated who might be an informant and so on.
Work in psychology, particularly by Gerd Gigerenzer, can help us understand this kind of intuitive knowledge.
3We are grateful to Grit Wesser for pointing us towards Gigerenzer’s work in the context of our collaborations within the project Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society. Dr Wesser observes similar forms of intuitive knowledge in her analysis of social/workplace networks in the GDR, for example, in her paper “Learning (how) to trust your gut: Suspicion, Stasi, and Socialisation in the former East Germany” at European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, Belfast UK, July 26–29, 2022. Gigerenzer notes that although we tend to think of human intelligence as deliberate, rational, and logical, the greater part of our mental life “is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions.”
4Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings, 3. Gigerenzer shows how this kind of intelligence—or “heuristic” form of reasoning and knowledge—is adaptive, that is, it is an evolutionary capacity that helps us navigate a complex and unknowable world.
5Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings; Gigerenzer, Rationality for Mortals; Gigerenzer and Gassmeier, “Heuristic Decision Making.” He defines “gut feelings,” “intuition,” or “hunch” as a judgment that is made quickly, for reasons we are not fully aware of, but of which we are certain enough to act upon.
6Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings, 16. Gut feelings are—Gigerenzer argues—based on “rules of thumb” or “heuristics,” which attempt to identify the most important information and ignore the rest.
7Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings, 18. Gigerenzer and Gassmeier, “Heuristic Decision Making,” 454. This kind of heuristic knowledge weaves “together data from the senses using prior knowledge about the world.”
8Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings, 44. That is, like other forms of knowledge, it is situated within the environment and cultural context in which the individual operates. A heuristic is—for Gigerenzer—“ecologically rational” because it is adapted to the environment.
9Gigerenzer and Gassmeier, “Heuristic Decision Making,” 457. In our context, the environment of the GDR literary scene, in which questions about whom to trust and how to act in different situations were necessarily based on incomplete information. In this chapter, we focus on moments in the interviews with cultural intellectuals when the interviewee describes this kind of intuition or “rule of thumb.” This allows us to unpack where these “rules” came from, and the role they played in allowing these individuals to trust in a society marked by distrust and to assert agency in the context of an authoritarian state that would seek to restrict it. Where appropriate, we supplement discussion of the interviews with material from the Stasi files and published sources produced by the authors that are the focus of this study.