"Popcock!" said Gertrude Stein.

With this unusually lucid and brief remark the writer who has grown famous for her "a rose is a rose is a rose" style dismissed recent efforts of scientists to explain her work.

"Popcock is popcock is science is popcock," Miss Stein might have been expected to say. But she did not, according to her report. For once, she failed to repeat herself or to bewilder her hearers.

The scientific explanation is that her writing is done with her wrist and not with her mind. Automatic writing is the scientific term for it. Miss Stein not only disagrees, but takes the view that her writing does not need explaining.

If you have seen her play, "Four Saints in Three Acts," or have read ay of her other strange writings, you probably feel that she needs as much explaining as that other famous "stein"—Einstein—who also always draws a capacity crowd but whom hardly anyone in the audience understands.

    —Jane Stafford, "Gertrude Stein Explained," Science News-Letter, 2 March 1935

A link this morning: Alice Bell on why calling for "scientific literacy" doesn't make sense.

This is apropos of her observation that what one of her FB friends called "the ultimate scab university," the New College of the Humanities, seems to place an awful lot of emphasis on "scientific literacy," by which they seem to mean "a list of Richard Dawkins-approved articles of faith supplemented of no particular understanding of why you should believe them or even what it means to believe them."

[Nina Power on the New College of the Humanities and its parasitic use of University of London resources:

Students of the new college will apparently ‘use many of the resources of the University of London: the exceptional library in Senate House, the University of London Union with its many societies and sports activities’ - how is this even remotely allowed? If you’re going to set up a private college, at least have the decency to buy your own fucking resources.

Also, a really spectacular rant in the Guardian by Terry Eagleton.]

We should really declare a moratorium on calling things "labs" willy-nilly.

Y'all know who you are.

"I want a poetry that's bad for you."

I study experimental poetry.* Experimental poetry, it is generally believed, is ethical poetry. I don't dispute that; indeed, I would argue the same. But what are those ethics, and are they always ethics with which we can agree? That, I think, is a question too rarely asked, and too rarely answered.

I think that the ethics of experimental poetry need not be ethics which we must endorse. I think, furthermore, that experimental poetry is often more concerned with the fact of having an ethics than with the content of its ethics. When we say that experimental poetry is ethical, therefore, it's necessary to specify just what ethical position is being espoused, whether we endorse it, and why anybody should care if we do.

If some poetry is experimental (for most values of "experimental"), then at some point you will see a particular strain of criticism applied to it. Privately (and now publicly, I guess), I call this critical strain "ethical chicken." The goal of ethical chicken is to convince your audience that the poetry you're talking about is the most ethical possible poetry, preferably on formal grounds.

While it's not particularly obvious why this should be the case, it's quite often taken for granted that this involves the negation of the lyric "I," by way of fragmentation, palimpsest, spectrality, suppression, objectification, indirection, obtuseness, or some potent combination of the above. The winner of ethical chicken finds hitherto unimagined ways to obliterate even the possibility of, even the desire for, coherent subjectivity, on the premise that subjectivity is, if not flat-out evil, certainly reprehensibly self-indulgent.

I rarely find this sort of criticism convincing, in part because the formal arguments are often tenuous (white space being taken as an indicator of a radical negation of the self, and suchlike) and in part because, in the end, I find the premise itself--that we should like poetry because it is so ethical--unpersuasive.

Don't get me wrong. I think there's quite a lot of poetry--really good poetry--that is precisely interested in just how splintered or evanescent the subject can be. I also find impersonality fascinating. If robots are involved, I'm usually in. (And the subtext to all of this is that my dissertation is all about the conjunction of ethics and epistemology in experimental writing, and by and large I would say that I endorse it.) What gives me pause is the slippage: first, the suggestion that eradicating the subject amounts to being ethical; second, the notion that the value of poetry lies in what good people it makes us. So fragmented, so committed to hard reality, so literally selfless.

But whatever reservations I have about it, ultimately it isn't the ethics of ethical chicken that worries me per se. Some sloppy philosophical shorthanding frequently goes on, but that's more or less how conversation works. Rather, it's the chicken that's the bigger problem: the logic of going one better, the construction of an ethical continuum in which sheer numerical intensity or increase is the grounds of success. I don't quite know why we so ubiquitously believe that poetry should be ethical, and that it succeeds by being more ethical than most poetry. After all, there are so many different, conflicting ways to be ethical that could be at work in any given poem. Puerile score-keeping replaces a genuine qualitative analysis--that's the problem with ethical chicken.

If we want to claim that a poetry is ethical (and we often do), we ought to be able to say in what respect it is so. We ought, moreover, to be able to say why we should care about it.

What, after all, constitutes a poetry that's bad for you? What does an unethical poetry look like? (Let's face it, it probably looks like flarf.) Whom are we implicitly critiquing when we play ethical chicken, and why?

*I also study other kinds of experimental writing, but today I am talking about poetry, specifically contemporary poetry, because that's where I see ethical chicken most frequently played.

Here I am writing an oppositional post after praising the positive argument. So it goes. Opposition is true friendship.

"I want a poetry that's bad for you": Bernstein, Charles. "Against National Poetry Month as Such." My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.

Ezra Pound, conflating epistemology with ethics:

Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offence, and he is punished or despised accordingly. (42)

Pound, Ezra. "The Serious Artist." Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. 41-57. Print.

Part of our DNA

UCB Professor Emeritus Oliver Williamson just won a Nobel prize in economics. Chancellor Birgeneau's email to the campus community on the topic ended thus:

Earlier this morning, at a press conference, Professor Williamson was asked what this prize meant for Berkeley, given the difficult budgetary challenges that we are facing. Commenting on Berkeley's commitment to excellence across the length and breadth of the campus and its palpable energy for creating a richly collaborative intellectual environment, Professor Williamson replied that our campus is incredibly resilient, that it has faced many challenges in the last 50 years, and that with all the good will and resources on our campus, he was confident that we would survive this crisis. He emphasized that it was the duty of all of us to work together and of our legislature in Sacramento to support the university and not to squander this precious resource. In a tribute to his colleagues and to the many graduate students whom he has taught and mentored, Professor Williamson modestly indicated that "some wonderful people are coming along and there are more prospects for Nobels ahead."

I thank Professor Williamson for his insightful remarks and for reminding us not to become too discouraged by short-term challenges. Today's Nobel Prize is clear evidence that Berkeley's excellence is recognized around the world. It is a part of our DNA that will not be changed and will be preserved for future generations.

Part of our DNA?

It's a metaphor, of course, but a metaphor for what? Our material constitution?

We've cut both teaching and hiring, so I'm going to guess that's not it.

Black boxes

If Marconi says something about ultra-short waves it MEANS something. Its meaning can only be properly estimated by someone who KNOWS.

     --Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading 25.

One of the reasons I find the history and philosophy of science (HPS) so useful in my work is its concern with the conditions of factuality. Bruno Latour calls facts "black boxes"; we don't worry about how they came to be determined; they're axiomatic.

HPS doesn't just open black boxes; it looks at how black boxes are made. I've seen a dictum floating around lately that strikes me as apt: "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Usually this dictum invokes the intractable reality of the fact, but to me it has more to do with social consensus. Latour argues that no statement, no matter how well it matches with data, can be a fact unless a community comes to a consensus about it, turning it into a black box. A fact can never be "your own."

To dispute a fact is to reopen the black box, inviting critique of the process by which the fact was established. Reopening a black box by definition has a destabilizing effect, because the fact is no longer being taken as a given. This is why science studies are so often caricatured as "debunking" science. And yet it is possible to examine the social and discursive conditions under which ideas become facts, and to understand where Hobbes was coming from, and still believe that there is such a thing as air pressure (to give one prominent example).

I was literally a child during the so-called "science wars"; the Sokal hoax transpired when I was about fourteen. They turned on the necessity of black boxes to get anything done.

Some things need to be black boxes, because all arguments require premises. Imagine teaching a course on twentieth-century history and having your students decide to debate whether there really was a Holocaust. It's not only inefficient; in this case it's morally repugnant. (And here we get into serious science studies territory: the intimate relationship between fact-making and morality.)

We hear from certain vocal factions that by making certain things into black boxes, we are shutting down debate. This is quite true. In my classroom, certain things are not up for debate: whether the Holocaust happened; whether women or people of color are capable of intellection or autonomy; whether there is such a thing as air pressure. If we entertained these questions, we would get nowhere.

This is exactly what Latour worries about in a 2004 essay: a tendency to open black boxes can be salutary, but can also lead to paranoid conspiracy theories (Obama's birth certificate, anyone?).

Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes -- society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism -- while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below.

To put it in literary terms, there was always something a little Gothic about Foucault.

And here is where I think literary criticism becomes useful to science studies: there was always something a little Gothic about science, too, whose residues emerge in culture (one prominent example would be Shelley's Frankenstein, directly inspired by the distinctly Gothic research of Luigi Galvani).

That's why the French physiologist Claude Bernard could write in 1865,

If I had to give an analogy to express my opinion about the science of life [the life sciences], I would say that it is a beautiful salon filled with light, which cannot be approached except by passing through a long and frightful kitchen. (28)

This remarkable quotation is about black boxes, cast in domestic terms. Teatime in the salon only happens by virtue of the messier labor occurring in the kitchen, and a humanities scholar would say that if we are interested in tea then we are also interested in the kitchen. Notice Bernard's language about the kitchen, however -- the space of labor and inquiry. We have feelings about it. It is "long and frightful."

Opening a black box is dangerous, yes, because in allowing disciplined scholars to examine the conditions of fact-production, we also invite less disciplined investigators to declare that facts are not facts and to argue for the legitimacy of theories legitimized by the consensus of the uninformed. (This is what leads Lorraine Daston to make a somewhat invidious distinction between a highly disciplinary and disciplined History of Science and a wilder and woollier, and less rigorous, Science Studies.)

Indeed, Latour seems to anticipate this when he titles the first chapter of Science in Action "Opening Pandora's Black Box," registering how science studies invites a world of trouble. As he puts it in the 2004 essay, "What social scientists do to our favorite objects is so horrific that certainly we don't want them to come any nearer. 'Please,' we exclaim, 'don't touch them at all! Don't try to explain them!" (240). Such a long and frightful kitchen.

Latour goes on to suggest that what's needed is a shift in focus from "matters of fact" to "matters of concern." I don't disagree, although I'm not sure Latour is so much pointing out a new direction as dividing good science studies from bad science studies (his footnotes seem to indicate the latter).

But what's more interesting to me is that feeling of fright. The upshot of Latour's 2004 essay is not that we must stop opening black boxes but that the fright must be removed and replaced by a feeling of warmth and security in our facts.

But there is a key difference between the fright mentioned by Bernard and that diagnosed by Latour, which is that for Bernard the fright is experienced by the investigator, for Latour by the believer in facts who is about to be pwned by a smug philosopher of science. For Latour, the (barbaric) critic experiences only the pleasure of domination, never the fear of uncertainty.

But can this be right? Doesn't any thoroughly sure-footed, smug critique amount to something less than critique? And perhaps the history of science can be forgiven for a overcorrecting a bit, after a tendency toward teleological just-so stories had made us so comfortable in our facts.

To open black boxes is to register the strange complexity of reality. This is a frightening pleasure: frightening because the danger is genuine, pleasurable because thinking people like a good scare.

As Jane Austen phrases it:

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all of Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; -- I remember finishing it in two days -- my hair standing on end the whole time." (121)

Austen recognizes as well as anyone how necessary it is to distinguish between critique and paranoid fantasies; Catherine Morland repeatedly tries literally to open black boxes only to find that they contain thoroughly banal items. When she is later confronted with a very material mystery -- that of General Tilney's sudden inhospitality -- her equally mystified mother counsels, "depend upon it, it is something not at all worth understanding" (232).

Her mother is mistaken, of course.

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1818; New York: Penguin, 1988. Print.

Bernard, Claude. Introduction à l'étude de la médécine expérimentale. Paris: Baillière, 1865.

Daston, Lorraine. "Science Studies and the History of Science." Critical Inquiry 35.4 (January 2009): 798-813. Chicago Journals. 17 July 2009. Web.

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Print.

---. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 225-48. Print.

Pound, Ezra. A B C of Reading. 1934; New York: New Directions, 1960. Print.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

You know, I think this sci-fi novel has been written.

(Link.)

If you get any cognitive dissonance with this following sentence, then "man" is not gender-neutral: "Like other mammals, man breastfeeds his young."

"You can't get much more scientific than graphic representations of how this product works on your skin cells."

Statistical Panic

Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009.

Statistical Panic challenges the idea that the category of the emotions is altogether psychological, and therefore a refuge from the political. By constellating a variety of texts -- literary, critical, social -- Woodward interrogates the emotions as sites of political thought and political action. The emotions have, she argues, a "cognitive edge." I find this formulation less illuminating than an example she returns to over and over, the moment in A Room of One's Own (one of my favorites) in which the narrator, sitting in the British Library, finds herself doodling a caricature of a professor, realizes that she is angry, and then realizes that her anger is a defense against the professor's anger. Anger is, for the narrator, a diagnostic and then analytical tool. Woolf's narrator offers a model for Woodward's meditative readings of the emotions.

In the first section of the book, Woodward explores the ways that feelings like anger, shame, and compassion have been theorized to different ends, and what different narratives about the emotions mean politically. These are suggestive and politically aware chapters that particularly point up the emotions surrounding identity politics: "feminist anger," the anger of the aging, racial shame, and politicized compassion. These chapters do important work to set up how Woodward thinks about (and with) emotions, but the real heart of the book, I think, is the second half on "new feelings," and particularly the final essay, titled, like the book itself, "Statistical Panic."* In these chapters, Woodward offers rubrics for thinking about the emotions occasioned by postmodern life, such as "sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs" and "bureaucratic rage," emotions that are often "impersonal" (you aren't really angry at the particular unhelpful bureaucrat on the other end of the line, for example, but rather at the bureaucracy itself). "Statistical Panic," I find, very powerfully names a "structure of feeling" embedded in what Ulrich Beck calls the "risk society." "Our bodies," Woodward points out, "are figured as being in a perpetual state of risk. The statistics profiling the body are for the most part melancholy and grim .... fatally we feel that a certain statistic, which is in fact based on an aggregate and is only a measure of probability, represents our very future" (196). Since the very nature of the statistic is to belong not to individuals but to groups, the emotions that statistics occasion oscillate between panic and boredom, postmodern analogues, Woodward suggests, to the modern dyad of shock/ennui.

Statistical Panic does not operate by argument but rather by constellation, juxtaposition, and suggestion. Woodward's language is most frequently a language of presentation: I refer to... I turn to... I take up ... Benjamin offers... X represents [emotion] in this way, while Y represents it in this other way. The book is therefore frustrating precisely when it is the most successful; at its most suggestive moments, I found myself wishing that Woodward would take an idea or a reading further, only to have her move on to some other, equally provocative text.

I particularly wished for greater pressure on the literary elements in this book; Woodward's eclecticism is clearly intentional, yet I frequently found myself wishing for a more explicit articulation of what role genre was playing in this map of the emotions. While Woodward often discusses popular culture in the familiar condemnatory terms ("postmodern televisual culture" and its tabloid obsessions, for instance, or the too-pat representation of statistics in the television drama Chicago Hope), any theory of the relationship between genre and feeling is at best only hinted at. Although in the introduction she suggests that "countering a fragment, or providing nuanced context for an information-story, is a more ample narrative -- a story," I wished for more on just what a "story" was, in contradistinction to the "information-story." These terms immediately conjured up for me Walter Benjamin's distinction between the "story" and "information" in his essay "The Storyteller," an essay that Woodward explicitly alludes to in her chapter on "Bureaucratic Rage" (172). But while Benjamin's terms are useful for Woodward, she ultimately and perhaps misleadingly uses them in quite a different way. The "story" that she privileges is above all the memoir, which she describes as "a medium promising (although not always delivering) intimate voices that allow us entrance into [the authors'] lives" (191). I cannot help thinking that this is more or less the opposite of what Benjamin means by "story," as I remember the moment in "The Storyteller" when Benjamin writes that

With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth.

It seems to me that the memoirs of "the tiny, fragile human body" that Woodward examines work much differently than the Benjaminian "story," and yet they do something for Woodward's account of postmodern feelings that is worth theorizing in greater depth. Precisely because, as Woodward so lucidly observes, statistics seem to encapsulate stories about our futures, a theory of how stories work in the age of statistical panic -- sometimes called the "information age" -- seems warranted.

Yet my desire to see such a theory articulated is, I recognize, a measure of the success with which Statistical Panic maps out an emotional terrain and places crucial issues in conversation. One cannot fairly complain that a book is not three chapters longer than it is, and I come away from reading this book with a raft of notes and references, especially on the studies of aging, illness, and disability, areas that have tended to be insufficiently attended to in theories of postmodernity.


*An earlier version of "Statistical Panic" appears in differences 11.2 (1999): 177-203, Duke Journals Online, PDF.

The curious phenomenon of your occipital horn

The American Museum of Natural History has a vast collection of mollusk specimens, both "dry" (shells) and preserved in fluid. We learn of these collections on a section of the web site dubbed "research"; naturalists who study mollusks might wish to consult the specimens at the museum and compare them to specimens that they themselves have observed. The pages there are practical and text-based. It is the land of the serious.



On the front page of the museum web site, on the other hand, we get something else:



That's right. Extreme mammals!

I like the link in the sidebar: "Extreme Extinction." Indeed.

Doris Day in Calamity Jane: a woman's touch, indeed.

With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface.

     --William Carlos Williams, "Marianne Moore," in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971): 318.

Williams praises the woman poet, even calls her scientific: but he still manages to do it in a way that emphasizes how good she is at cleaning. Oh, modernism.

Progress

Later it struck me that the best history of painting in London was the National Gallery, and that the best history of literature, more particularly of poetry, would be a twelve-volume anthology in which each poem was chosen not merely because it was a nice poem or a poem Aunt Hepsy liked, but because it contained an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression.

--Ezra Pound, "How to Read"

Pound is here advocating rewriting the history of literature on the model of (one version of) the history of science: as a progress narrative, not unlike the march through various models of the atom that constituted your tenth-grade chemistry book's sole nod to history. (Okay, perhaps it mentioned Boyle as well.)

This forward-moving model of history, from triumph to triumph, depends in part on repudiating the literary judgment of Aunt Hepsy, which is of necessity a matter of mere taste, and probably bad taste at that. That Aunt Hepsy (a spinster, a Hepzibah Pyncheon?) liked a poem carries no weight with Pound. Poetry is important stuff, the stuff of progress, and that clearly has nothing to do with the opinions of old women.

Modernism's "new realism" depended in part on masculinizing poetry through the authority of science/scientism. What did this mean for modernist poets like Marianne Moore, who were genuinely interested in science but who, by reason of their social station, were increasingly coming to resemble Aunt Hepsy as the years passed?

Ezra Pound, "How to Read," Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) 17.

Nineteenth-century scientist of the week: Elliott Coues

Elliott Coues, 1842-1899

Coues was an ornithologist, naturalist, and (according to Wikipedia) army surgeon. I first ran across him in Frederic A. Lucas's The Story of Museum Groups, a guide leaflet from the American Museum of Natural History.



Museum groups, or "habitat groups," are free-standing groups of stuffed animals, usually dioramas in which specimens are placed in a more or less naturalistic position, with an artificial background that simulates the animal's habitat. Here is one currently on display at the AMNH:


(You can read all about this diorama here.)

Coues is quoted in the leaflet as a representative of the anti-museum group old guard, saying "as late as 1874" that

'Spread eagle' styles of mounting, artificial rocks and flowers, etc., are entirely out of place in a collection of any scientific pretensions, or designed for popular instruction. Besides, they take up too much room. Artistic grouping of an extensive collection is usually out of the question; and when this is unattainable, halfway efforts in that direction should be abandoned in favor of severe simplicity. Birds look best, on the whole, in uniform rows, assorted according to size, as far as natural classification allows. (Lucas 5)

For Coues, there was something anti-scientific about the habitat group; he felt that specimens should be displayed according to their taxonomy rather than their ecological contexts. So, for instance, an ostrich would be displayed next to an emu, not next to warthogs (as they actually were at the AMNH in the 1940s). If I recall correctly, the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes is in large part arranged taxonomically even today, for instance. (But then, they also had a quite goofy exhibit on dragons in the basement when I visited.)

Coues isn't particularly best known for his views on museum groups; they were common enough views in the nineteenth century. He's better known for his commitment to classification and his interest in westward exploration (he edited Lewis and Clark's journals, for example), and of course his extensive studies of birds.

Like many other scientists of the period, Coues was interested in spiritualism, and he was also a member of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was for many years committed to the notion of "biogen," a "substance of mind," or "soul-stuff," in which, according to Coues, the vital principle resided (Coues 14-5). As best I can gloss it, it was vitalism with a spiritualist twist. The idea was not welcomed by the scientific community at large, but in 1885 Coues wrote,

I know that I have made a great discovery which conservative science will properly be slow to acknowledge. I also know that I can demonstrate the thing. Meanwhile, people may call me what they please, and I say proudly, with Galvani, 'they may call me the frog's dancing-master -- but I know that I have discovered one of the great forces of nature.' Galvinism [sic] is an accepted scientific fact: so will Biogen be in due time, and sooner perhaps than even I suppose. (qtd. in Cutright and Brodhead 304)

Famous last words. This is yet another example of the way that science and its protocols fluctuate and are subject to dispute.

Here's his obituary in The Nation.

Coues, Elliott. Biogen: A Speculation on the Origin and Nature of Life. 3rd ed. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1884.

Cutright, Paul Russell, and Michael J. Brodhead. Elliott Coues: Naturalist and Frontier Historian. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Lucas, Frederic A. The Story of Museum Groups. 4th ed. Guide Leaflet Series, No. 53. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1926.

ETA: Apparently students who are given chocolate give more positive teaching evaluations. Oh, for crying out loud.

ETA (again): I appear to have been linked by "Your Unique Portal to the Conservative Blogosphere." It must be very unique, because last I checked, nineteenth-century spiritualist ornithologists were not a conservative issue, or a political issue at all, for that matter. In fact, this blog is in no way a part of the "conservative blogosphere," unless we are talking about conserve in the jam/jelly sense, in which case, well, maybe.

Overly confrontational physics

I spent the afternoon of New Year's Day pleasantly with my friend Katie and her five-year-old, Quinn, at Lawrence Hall of Science. I'd never visited before, though Quinn was an old regular there.

I spotted the shirt below in the gift shop.



I don't recognize the equation, though I can hear C.P. Snow roaring in my ear, Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?.

The humor of the shirt lies in the deformation of a set linguistic phrase, in this case, the faintly aggressive "What part of [X] don't you understand?" In its usual context, X is something very simple, such as "no." Ideally, it's something that doesn't have parts in the first place. This makes the question rhetorical: there's nothing to debate, because X is so very self-evident. If you understand X, as you must, then the conversation is finished.

The phrase is aggressive because it suggests that the reader/listener must be very stupid to have disagreed with the speaker; it suggests that such disagreement can only result from an inability to understand some part of the very simple X.

The phrase on the shirt deforms the template phrase by making X something visually complicated, with many parts. The humor turns precisely on our receiving the equation as complicated, difficult to understand. But it retains the aggressivity of the original template phrase, even as it undercuts itself. You must be very stupid not to understand X, which I am positioning as not at all simple; that is, you must be very stupid relative to me.

Indeed, we are not meant to be able to understand the equation, or even see it: unlike the template into which it is inserted, X is here rendered in small close-set type. It is the aggressive template that is emphasized by the shirt's typography; of the equation, we are only meant to catch enough of a glimpse to see that it is complicated and contains line integrals. It doesn't matter whether the reader can see or read the equation; it's assumed up front that the reader wouldn't understand it anyway.

The wearer of the shirt thereby lays claim to membership in a contemptuous literati, whose aggressivity is both incited and justified by the difference between the wearer's ability to understand X and reader's presumed, typographically enforced, and culpable inability to understand it.

This is one popular understanding of what it means to be a scientist.

Times are tough. Let the humanities help you.

A few weeks ago one of my friends was interviewed in a coffee shop about the crumbling economy. She was in that coffee shop working on her dissertation because she doesn’t have an office (neither does any grad student in my department). The reporter asked her how the stock crashes were affecting her. She responded that they didn’t affect her at all -- that she lived well below the poverty line, and did the reporter know what kind of money you have to have to get into the stock market?

Nonetheless, those who had anything to lose have lost it or are in the process of losing it. People want to point fingers.

The obvious people to blame are the people who somehow made money off of crazy meta-economic juggling and somehow made the rest of the economy depend on the aforementioned juggling.

But that’s boring. With our long-held Freudian taste for analysis, we’re moved to dig deeper, and by “dig deeper,” I mean “dig shallowly and pull up the first ready-made pat narrative you find.”

That narrative, of course, is the two cultures, for lo, it will not die.

Thus in yesterday’s New York Times, I find Maureen Dowd crowing that too much technocracy has gotten us into trouble and we must all go back to reading Latin so that we can learn from the Stoics that greed is bad. Capital is scarce: cultural capital is back!!

Then Op-Ed contributor Richard Dooling writes that “math and physics geeks” are raining destruction upon us, in the form of nuclear warfare and financial ruin.

And then there is Harold Bloom, who advocatesreading Emerson.

Let’s look for a moment at how Bloom quotes Emerson:

Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and Love, — behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and unconquered still.

“Pride,” “Thrift,” “Expediency”? That’s nineteenth-century talk for business school – which Dooling improbably aligns with physicists. In short, it’s all number-people collapsed together. “Philosophy and Love,” on the other hand -- the humanities.

So after hearing that the humanities are in crisis for basically the entire time I’ve been in the humanities, I’m starting to hear that this is our hour of glory.

The logic seems to go:

There are two cultures, numbers culture and humanities culture. Finance isn't part of the humanities, so it must be part of the numbers culture, which also includes, I don't know, botanists and the Maytag repair person. The soulless numbers culture, like the Republican party, squandered its period of dominance, and now the other party will rise to power. That would be the humanities. Here is the Soul erect and unconquered still!

That's where I'm balking. It takes some really confused categories (Dooling, I’m looking at you) to make nuclear physics, robot takeovers, and the world financial system into the same phenomenon. Physicists actually have nothing to do with the economic crisis. Correlation is not causation, and numbers per se do not create hubris.

It also takes some pretty confused categories to think of Latin, “philosophy and love,” or Emerson as the inverse of irresponsible economics. The economy is a mess, but Emerson is not going to come back into fashion. Latin is not going to come back either. The NYT editors will not suffer Dowd columns in Latin for long. People are not going to come flocking to the more decrepit buildings on campus beating their breasts and calling out, “Oh, literature professors! We were wrong! Sell us your academic monographs!”

The current economic situation is not about the two cultures. The two cultures are not real. The two cultures, as being invoked here, are an intellectually lazy binary that lets us point fingers without actually having to think about economics.

But I am pretty sure the current situation is actually about economics.

Smug presentist science and historical fiction

I recently read a trio of children's novels set in the Elizabethan period, concerning a boy (orphan, naturally!) who joins Shakespeare's acting company.

When I taught A Room of One's Own a few years ago, I had my class discuss the "Shakespeare's sister" section. The almost universal cry was, "well she knows girls aren't allowed on the stage; why doesn't she just dress up as a boy?"

That masquerading as male is the natural solution to all a woman's woes is of course suggested by a good number of Shakespeare's plays (including Hamlet!). But it completely fails on a political level; it presupposes that the problems posed by women's social circumscription are always exceptional and individual. Cross-dressing isn't a political solution; women as a class cannot masquerade as male in order to gain basic rights. (Though, now that I think about it, it could be argued that the 1980s shoulder-padded, pretend-you-are-okay-with-not-getting-parental-leave model of feminism was an attempt to effect exactly that solution.)

Nonetheless, in his one (in my opinion, failed) attempt to present a three-dimensional female character, Gary Blackwood has said female character... dress up like a boy.* Sigh.

But that is not what I am writing to complain about today. No, my peeve of the moment is: Why is it that in historical novels for children, the main characters always magically transcend the scientific paradigms of their times and intuit the tenets of today's science?

Off the top of my head I can think of not only Widge in The Shakespeare Stealer (etc.) but also Jane from Boston Jane and Ayla in The Clan of the Cave Bear (this last not children's fiction, but something I read as a child -- bizarrely, on an adult's recommendation). I'm pretty sure that if I were to think on it I'd come up with a few more.

It always goes something like this: everybody says disease is caused by foul air, but Spunky Protagonist feels, just feels in her or his heart, that it is transmitted by "tiny seeds" that get passed along by rats and insects. It's just a feeling!

I suppose we are meant to see that pre-twenty-first-century science is so obviously crazy that we couldn't possibly respect a character that believes in such mumbo-jumbo.

This smug presentist attitude presumes that anyone with an ounce of sense could see that, for instance, blood-letting isn't an effective medical practice. But medicine is a notoriously difficult science to control; in any given case there are about a zillion possible confounding factors.

That's why it's irritating when characters intuit the tenets of modern science, but even more irritating when they figure those tenets out from faux-experimental methods. Like the character just happens to notice that, every time a person has blood let, that person's illness gets worse.

Man, if science really worked that way, we'd be in Physics City, as my father would say. Total determinism! No confounding variables! Completely clear-cut data every time! No significant sample size necessary! ...Anyone with an ounce of sense can see it!

The truth is that science is much more complicated than that, which is why centuries of genuinely smart people in the West did not come up with the germ theory of disease. It's not that they lack even the smallest modicum of purchase on reality. It's that science is not straightforward and self-evident. That is why our society employs professional scientists to do research.

It's my impression that this irritating phenomenon in children's historical fiction derives from the fact that most contemporary readers hardly know anything about science, but cling to the few things they do know (by the authority of textbooks or, sketchily, science journalism, and not by experiment) as if it makes them the intellectual superior of the entire population of the world prior to the present era.

This is actually not a new sentiment, but an outgrowth of aggressive Western progress narratives that were particularly prevalent in the nineteenth century. As Thorstein Veblen put it in his 1906 essay "The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation,"

Other ages and other peoples excel in other things [than science] and are known by other virtues. [He gives several examples of achievements in art, metaphysics, and mythology.] ...but in the eyes of modern civilised men all these things seem futile in comparison with the achievements of science.

Science is perceived as the marker of modernity as well as the thing that makes modernity superior to whatever came before it.

Mark Twain even wrote a whole book about a guy (a Yankee, significantly) who goes back in time and (violently) kicks the crap out of a whole lot of medieval people, and a medieval myth in particular (King Arthur) by means of his modern understanding of science and technology. (He also just happens to have a lot of random stuff on him, such as batteries and lead pipes. Hey, no problem! I keep such things in my purse as well.)

The violence with which the protagonist uses science and technology to attack myth and the people invested in it is striking.

But as Veblen suggests, a feeling of temporal superiority is also frequently translated into cultural superiority. A contemporary review of Connecticut Yankee by Sylvester Baxter reveals how nineteenth century narratives about historically prior people slipped easily into narratives about "primitive" people -- "pre"-scientific people who were supposed to need colonization or, as the case might be, violence. The medieval population of the novel becomes a figure for the colonized peoples of the nineteenth century -- needing to be dragged in to modernity, by force if necessary.

By resorting to the principle that "distribution in time" is paralleled by "distribution in space," we may solve many a problem. So there is a certain aspect of sober truth in this most fanciful tale, and, just as the Connecticut Yankee went back into the days of King Arthur's court, so might he go out into the world today, into Central Asia or Africa, or even into certain spots in this United States of ours, find himself amidst social conditions very similar to those of 1300 years ago, and even work his astonishing 19th century miracles with like result.

Nineteenth century science is (ironically) miraculous, and therefore unproblematically equal to progress. Connecticut Yankee is indeed a book about progress -- an anxious one, in which progress depends on mass bloodshed. But Baxter blithely ignores the ideological component of this narrative, even adding some progress-talk about the book's production:

The advance in the art of popular bookmaking in the past two decades is illustrated by the contrast between Innocents Abroad and this volume. In illustration, the progress is particularly notable. Even a child of today would turn in contempt from the crude woodcuts of the former to the beautiful pen-and-ink drawings by Dan Beard that adorn the new work.

Even a child. In the contest of least-infantilized-subject, the modern Western child turns out to be the winner.

As the inheritor of the new science, the newest people -- Western children -- get to assume intellectual authority over both colonized subjects and medieval people (Innocents and its "crude woodcuts") in a way that mimics the intellectual authority that adults hold over them (in school, for instance, where they learn this science and are disabused of fantasies in the first place). It is no wonder that the child is expected to turn away in contempt: it is the contempt of self-recognition.

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Gary Blackwood, The Shakespeare Stealer (1998); Shakespeare's Scribe (2000); Shakespeare's Spy (2003).

*The character in question, in my opinion, is usually absent and therefore never a presence; or rather, she is present insofar as she presents as male. Otherwise she is a mystery, an absence, a... lack. H'm, wonder where I've seen that before.

All the cultural capital money can buy

Here's another instance of the commodification of the idea of science, here embodied in the "genius" figure of Albert Einstein:





The t-shirt reads "GENIUS OF LOVE." Um. Okay.

Here's another funny item for sale, spotted at one of the many yuppie stores that have invaded Elmwood in recent years (I suppose I should say super-yuppie, since Elmwood wasn't exactly gritty when I moved here).



Seen in the photo below: posh white-painted, fake wooden books to, er, leave lying around on your floor?




Whatever, fools. I have the real deal.

Science in a bottle

Let's face it, between dissertating and teaching, I don't get out much. The total span of my world on an average day can be walked in twenty minutes. This is why, when I do bother to venture out of my academic cocoon, I am always amazed by what I find.

For instance.



Yes, this here is a "skin care" establishment in Rockridge. Who knew you needed to go in to a special facility to have your skin cared for? Mine seems to be sticking to my flesh all right so far, but in the event of a zombie attack, I know I will feel reassured by the presence of a skin care facility just down the road.

Even better, check out what this place has for sale!



Yes, that says science in a bottle. And here I wasted all that time in college taking science classes.



The copy reads:

Science in a Bottle

Remarkable Breakthrough Tightens and Defines the Eye Area

C-ESTA Eye Repair Concentrate (TM) containing DAE Complex IV is a medically based breakthrough for rejuvenating the thinner wrinkle prone eye area, as well as minimizing further signs of aging. This intensive formula contains higher concentrations of lipid soluble Vitamin C along with other remarkable topical agents that dramatically reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles.

Research by Nicholas Perricone, M.D. demonstrates that DAE Complex encourages collagen production, protects against and repairs free radical damage, tightens and defines the eye area and generally promotes skin that is noticeably younger and smoother.

This exceptional eye therapy creates visible improvement from the first application, and cumulative use results in a measurably tighter, firmer and more resilient eye area.

See Results Today!

Wow. That is a remarkable breakthrough. Apparently the more science you apply to your eye area, the "tighter, firmer and more resilient" it becomes. Did my college physics class do that? No.

Clearly, science has advanced since I was in college.

And... yet another person who has not done the reading.

It has long been recognized that if only something could be done in psychology remotely comparable to what has been achieved in physics, practical consequences might be expected even more remarkable than any that the engineer can contrive. The first positive steps in the science of the mind have been slow in coming, but already they are beginning to change man’s whole outlook.
          I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry, 1926

Hillary recently sent me a link to this article, Jonathan Gottschall’s "Measure for Measure" at the Boston Globe.

Gottschall argues that literary criticism is in crisis, and that its hope for salvation is – surprise! – science. It's not just that literary critics should "embrace" science, as the article's subtitle suggests -- a vague suggestion, in any case; who in literary criticism is honestly against science?

No, Gottschall, has something better in mind -- do science!

"In some cases," he writes, "it's possible to use scientific methods to question cherished tenets of modern literary theory." Now, there are very few actual tenets of modern literary theory, so this ought to be interesting.

Gottschall:

Consider the question of the "beauty myth": Most literary scholars believe that the huge emphasis our culture places on women's beauty is driven by a beauty myth, a suite of attitudes that maximizes female anxiety about appearance in order, ultimately, to maintain male dominance.

I'm puzzled by Gottschall's failure to cite the source of the term "beauty myth," Naomi Wolf's 1990 book The Beauty Myth. Perhaps he elided the source because if he were to cite it, he would have to admit that Naomi Wolf is not a literary critic, and The Beauty Myth is not a work of literary criticism. Wolf has a bachelor's degree in English, just like half the people you know.

But even leaving that aside, in what sense is the beauty myth a tenet of literary theory? Literary theory is, by definition, a body of theories about literature. So what does the beauty myth have to do with literary theory at all?

Answer: zilch.

Unfazed by the irrelevance of his example, Gottschall goes on.

It's easy to find evidence for this idea in our culture's poems, plays, and fairy tales: As one scholar after another has documented, Western literature is rife with sexist-seeming beauty imagery.

Sexist-seeming, please note. It is not sexist to treat women as decorative objects because, Gottschall is going to tell us, science says so.

Gottschall:

Scholars tend to take this evidence as proof that Western culture is unusually sexist.

Actually, scholars do not do that. Going through literary works to find sexist ideology (which abounds) and saying, “Aha! Western culture is unusually sexist! More sexist than most cultures!” is not a literary enterprise. For a literary critic, Gottschall seems alarmingly unaware of what it is that we actually do. I challenge Gottschall to come up with some citations of “scholars” (plural) who have said this. Not Naomi Wolf: actual literary critics.

And note, too, that Gottschall needs the conclusion that his straw-critics have drawn to be that Western culture (already a problematic term) is unusually sexist, because it’s that unusually that he’s going to use Science! to undermine:

But is this really the case? In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture. Its ultimate roots apparently lie not in the properties of any specific culture, but in something deeper in human nature.

So what Gottschall claims to be establishing is that Western culture (a monolithic, unexamined term) is not more fixated on women's physical objecthood than are other cultures. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation, there.

He goes on to conclude that objectifying women comes from "human nature" (another extra-special unexamined term). Because obviously, there are exactly two possible sources for the beauty myth: “Western culture” and “human nature.” Way to use reason, there.

(Of course, considering that the written record that Gottschall uses as his corpus has been controlled by men for centuries, "human nature" winds up meaning "male nature." Again.)

Gottschall provides several other examples, each providing a banal “scientific” result refuting a straw-man version of some belief (supposedly) widely held in the humanities, smirkily holding scientific methods up as infallible and, moreover, always appropriate.

Here’s the thing about calls for the humanities to “embrace science.” They aren’t anywhere near new. It’s not just that, as Gottschall acknowledges, C.P. Snow was asking humanists and scientists to talk to one another in the 50’s.

In fact, the call for the humanities to emulate the sciences came in with the New Criticism, the influential movement that shaped the modern English department, well before Snow started getting cranky. It’s rooted in nineteenth century positivism as reinterpreted by the modernists, that sense that Science! can do anything!

But as it turns out, science can’t do everything, which is why literary studies exist, with separate disciplinary methods. Moreover, science and its methods aren’t infallible – nor are they static. When you use computational methods to analyze style, your results are only going to be as good as your algorithm, and your algorithm is ultimately limited by what the writer of the algorithm can conceive.* Science fucks up all the time; that’s the nature of experiment. Good scientists acknowledge the limits of their research, measure their error bars, and reflect on their methods.

People with a poor understanding of how the sciences and literary studies work and an ignorance of those disciplines’ histories write articles in the Boston Globe proclaiming that literary studies should remodel itself after the sciences.

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*I am not, by the way, against the use of computational methods in the humanities. In fact, I find what I've learned about them interesting and would like to learn more. I am, on the other hand, thoroughly against bullshit articles with heroic narratives about computational methods valiantly revealing the truth that hundreds of doddering old professors refuse! to! see!