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.

A very cool short film, featuring typography.



(Via @christianbok.)

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."

The Lantern Lecture

Well, I got hold of W. R. Butterfield (thanks, Southern Regional Library Facility!), and was amused by the bit of the succeeding article that made its way into the scan. Museums Journal reports that a Dr. C. H. Townsend has complained of the widespread use of lantern slides at conferences:



People were annoyed by Powerpoint before it was even Powerpoint, it seems.

"The Lantern Lecture." Museums Journal 11 (1912): 346.

Three cute things to use as decoration

1. Birds.


2. Butterflies.


3. Asian women.


(Source: Elmwood Stationers.)

Fairies and Indians

I subscribe to Debbie Reese's RSS feed because she puts books on my radar that usually wouldn't otherwise get there. Her blog on the representation of Native Americans in children's literature is not a litcrit blog per se--it's closer to Sociological Images, except there's only one theme: obnoxious and harmful stereotypes about Native Americans.

This is the "strong ideology" model if you like, but it's a theme that bears repeating. Debbie's posts don't have the texture, twists, and turns of, say, Aaron's. But you see the necessity of what she does when time and again she rebuts comments by offended school librarians and authors. They're offended, of course, that Debbie was offended by their stereotyping of Native Americans.

Their first line of defense is of course authorial creativity. It's not books that grossly stereotype (homogenize, Orientalize, temporally displace, and kill off) Native Americans that are miseducating children; it's the terrible people who want to censor creativity. Do we not realize that this is art.

And as a corollary, It's just a book; it's not real.

Ought we forget that there are actual children involved--some of them nonwhite? And that when we depict certain people as "magical," we move them into the realm of the not-real as well?

Is it really a terrible abridgment of artistic license to insist that historically oppressed peoples are not toys for you to play with?



Today Debbie writes about a trope in the unreal-Indians vein:

This morning, I read an article in the Telegraph about the "Latitude Festival," an annual music festival that takes place in Suffolk, England. The first one was in 2006. The article in the Telegraph isn't about the music. Instead, Neil McCormick describes the people and setting. Here's what caught my eye:

People enter into the spirit with colourful costumes: there were parties of American Indians, Smurfs and an engaging posse of pensionable old dears dressed as fairies. The audience is, it has to be said, overwhelmingly white and middle-class (and probably predominantly middle-aged).

Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Reading those words reminded me of an email I received on December 30, 2007 in response to critiques I posted about one of Jan Brett's books. In her email, the author wrote:

Why is there always someone who wants to rain on someone else's parade? Why can't children just enjoy a good read? I am sure you don't believe in Santa, the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny because they are incorrect in guiding young children's beliefs.

For those that want to study the American Indian ways and beliefs, good for them. For now I will read and enjoy books, just because.

It struck me that she would cast American Indians in that particular framework---of things-not-real. She is a librarian in a public school in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Santa. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny.
Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Debbie's post caught my attention because the Indian-as-fairy trope has been something I've been thinking about, in a back-burner way, for a few years now. The Indian in the Cupboard and Disney's Pocahontas are two twentieth-century examples, but it's also powerfully present in the literature of the early 1800s, leading up to and following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1826), Mary Conant is an Episcopalian misfit among the Puritans, having a "fairy" nature better suited to old England (17). In an act of rebellion carefully staged to evoke British fairy myths, she walks into the woods to find a husband:

...taking a stick and
marking out a large circle on the margin of the stream, she stept into the magic ring, walked round three times with measured tread, then carefully retraced her steps backward, speaking all the while in a distinct but trembling voice. The following were the only words I could hear,

Whoever's to claim a husband's power,
Come to me in the moonlight hour.

And again,—

Whoe'er my bridegroom is to be,
Step in the circle after me.

She looked round anxiously as she completed the ceremony; and I almost echoed her involuntary shriek of terror, when I saw a young Indian spring forward into the centre. (23)

The mapping of Indian to fairy here is unmistakable; likewise, the ideology that fashions the Indian as destined to vanish (as the fairies are said to have vanished from England, inevitably, with the coming of modernity). Comparing Native Americans to Smurfs makes them not-real; comparing them to fairies makes them an anachronism, a move that can be and has been used to justify their brutal marginalization. And indeed, Hobomok eventually honorably disappears to make way for white modernity.

We're used to the figure of the Vanishing Indian in the U.S.; in parallel, some have hypothesized that the Vanishing Fairy in British folklore is actually based on an oppressed indigenous group, the Picts (I don't have the books on hand, but I believe that Diane Purkiss, for one, entertains this theory).

What's interesting is the way that images of Native Americans can be appropriated as symbols of national identity even while that nation founded itself in part on the violent oppression of said Native Americans. This, too, finds a parallel in fairy mythology, here courtesy of John Ruskin:

Suppose you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to run,--no more—and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold.

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let them all run there. And this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of the wood... (126-7)

Fairies, vanishing though they be, remain powerful signifiers of English identity. Ruskin argues that it is a tone to transform the English landscape through industry, yet there is a sense of resignation in his words. And perhaps Ruskin can be resigned because, he argues, in spite of everything, the fairies in England will persist. Even if England should lose its gardenlike character (which Ruskin hopes will not happen), England will remain English, hence populated by fairies. In a similar way, Native Americans (who, unlike fairies, are real) are appropriated as signifiers of Americanness even as their anachronism is enforced. And frequently, that enforcement arrives by way of children's literature, which is, don't you know, creative.

On access

One thing I really enjoy about being at UC Berkeley is the genuine diversity of the undergraduate population. When I was an undergraduate at a private university, I rarely encountered transfer students, and when I did, they had transferred from Columbia or Smith. That's not to say that the population there wasn't diverse in its own way (geographically, for instance, it beat Berkeley by a mile), but here there's a regular stream of transfer students, and "transfer" almost universally means "transferred from a community college." Cal is an élite university, but it's also part of a much wider state higher education system.

One of the big concerns with the current budget crisis is its impact on UC's commitment to access. It's obvious that access will be reduced: UC and CSU are taking fewer students and raising fees. At UC Berkeley, Chancellor Birgeneau has estimated that reduced course offerings will cause students to graduate a semester later on average, which is in essence another fee hike, not to mention time that those students will never get back. This is all happening while private colleges are dropping their need-blind admissions policies, further shutting down opportunities for lower-income students.

So it will be harder for many Californians to get to campus.

But access is not just about being physically present, or being able to afford the fees. Pierre Bourdieu wrote some very famous books about this, in fact!

Power is coded in the university; hierarchical relationships are shifting and unclear (the eternal TA problem, for instance), and boundaries between the professional and the personal are invisible. I suspect this is one reason the "customer" model of the university is so attractive to some students; they don't know how to be part of an academic community and negotiate those invisible boundaries, but they do know how to be consumers. It's a system they know.

To really benefit from going to college, you need to go to class and do the reading, of course. And that's clear-cut for most people; the syllabus says "do this," and you do it or you don't do it, but in any case you know what you were supposed to do.

But that's just the beginning. College is also a place for building peer networks, for becoming acculturated in academic life (which is also a certain class acculturation), for gaining experience, confidence, professionalism, and kinds of social capital that can't show up on a transcript. And for that, you also have to venture out into the gray areas.

Suppose you want to better your lot in life by applying for a Rhodes scholarship. If the "access" we offer is meaningful, then this should be perfectly possible. But when my sister applied for the Rhodes, she needed twelve letters of recommendation. How do you get those twelve faculty letters? You have to feel entitled enough to the attention of your professors that you can persistently show up at office hours, ask them to read your work, and ask them to write nice things about you. In some ways, it very much resembles asking for a personal favor.

And you have to ask even if you went to a public high school where you had to go through a metal detector every day; even if, unlike some of your classmates, you've never traveled abroad or gone skiing or worn expensive shoes. Even if your childhood friends or your parents seem to suspect that by going to an élite school, you've abandoned them. Even if you're short on cultural capital, in other words, and feel that perhaps you're not entitled to ask.

Meanwhile, a high student-to-faculty ratio means long lines of students camped outside professors' offices, and work-study means having fewer daytime hours in which to do that kind of camping. Two sociologists found that

fully a third of all Rhodes Scholars between 1947 and 1992 earned undergraduate degrees from just 3 universities: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard alone produced 1 in 5 Rhodes Scholars over this 50 year period. (10)

When you consider even the logistics alone, it's not surprising.

One of the most disheartening things about the current budget cuts is the reduction in small seminars that's resulting around the UC. UC Irvine even looks to be canceling its transfer seminars, which are supposed to help transfer students orient themselves in their new university. This will disproportionately affect the students who do not come from privilege.

While administrators are right to worry about brain drain in the faculty ranks, we should also worry about brain drain among undergraduates--undergraduates who don't come pre-marked as "brain" because they don't come with cultural capital or a diploma from Exeter, but who are some of the UC's most important people.

Non-plagiarized essays for your plagiarizing pleasure

Found in my spam folder:



Subject line: "Outstanding Quality & Professional Custom ESSAYS for only $7.9 -- Non-Plagiarized."


Yes, it appears that these quality essays that are available to you for $7.9x are "non-plagiarized."

That is, they haven't been plagiarized yet.

A technicality.

Works cited

I've finally come up with a title for this blog.

Citation, appropriation, and pastiche are the postmodern techniques par excellence, and yet for some reason this seems to go hand in hand with a willful resistance to documentation of any kind. Yesterday I read a review of a book that I respect; the reviewer excoriated the author for being "an appalling writer." The crime? Referring too frequently to her scholarly predecessors and interlocutors! Evidently that's just too boring to be allowed. Heaven forbid that a reader be made to take notice of a heterogeneous intellectual tradition. I've even heard someone complain about an editor noting textual variants in the endnotes. What?

I love citations. They help me do my work, follow up on interests, figure out the terrain. I hate it when books have endnotes but not a comprehensive bibliography. I despise an edition that has no note on the editorial principles. The more apparatus the better.

So here's to works cited in the age of appropriation.

A propaganda video for something I can get behind:



I certainly was amazed at the packaging involved in a recent Amazon order:



Yes, that's two boxes you're seeing! I'm not sure how a metal jam pot warrants that kind of protection.

(Via @mitpress.)

Museum of Ideas

In searching around for more on W.R. Butterfield's "museum of ideas" (1912), I ran across this piece of current legislation:

H.R. 202: Museum of Ideas Act

1/6/2009--Introduced.

Museum of Ideas Act of 2009 - Establishes the Museum of Ideas Commission to develop a plan for establishing in Washington, D.C., a museum that presents the history and evolution of human ideas.

Hmm.

By the way, Google Books is a cataloguing nightmare. Who made up their categories, Jorge Luís Borges?

UC Regents committee has voted

From the Daily Cal:

Amid rancor and outcry from employees, a committee of the UC Board of Regents voted Wednesday morning to force its employees to take unpaid days off in an attempt to balance its unprecedented $813 million budget deficit.

The full board is expected to approve the plan when the meeting resumes Thursday.

[...]

Most faculty will see an 8 percent reduction in salary as a result of the furlough days, decreasing salaries already 20 to 25 percent below those at top private peer universities, an effect UC professors said would make it nearly impossible to attract new faculty and retain senior professors.

"As a department chair, I cannot retain these people as well as hire people," said Sandra Faber, chair of the astronomy and astrophysics department at UC Santa Cruz. "We do not have that long because our professors, particularly the assistant professors, are gong to bolt, and we are going to enter an irrecoverable slide."

Before the meeting, a number of UC professors said many junior faculty are already considering leaving the UC system. If the furlough program should last longer than a year, Mary Croughan, chair of the Academic Council, said it will damage the UC system.

More:

Saree Makdisi, "The Last Crisis at the University of California?"

And in the spirit of free inquiry:



Rhetoric nerds will agree that the ad hominem fallacy has been invoked here.