Labels: English Literature, graffiti, literary theory
We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.The economic and political reasons for this polarising antagonism are understandable (see this previous post). However, in historical terms this total rejection of supernaturalism can be challenged. The first half of my research thesis examines the history of supernaturalist encounters from within - rather than opposed to - mainstream empirical science. It shows how, from Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, through the nineteenth-century's Society for Psychical Research, through James Clerk Maxwell's thermodynamic demon, to Marvin Minsky's demonic model of consciousness, rationalists have engaged with the supernatural when science reached the limits of Enlightenment methods of enquiry. And whilst science since the Enlightenment has driven us through multiple technological revolutions in a remarkably short span of time, it is worth remembering (as Coyne clearly has not) that for the majority of human history supernatural ways of interpreting the world have been the dominant ones, and human knowledge and technology still developed over this far longer period, albeit much less spectacularly.
There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that's eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology's basic personality types number 1,728.Rather than "more being better," one would expect that a personality model that divides people into four types will be more reliable than one that uses 1,728, since even a randomised response to the Myers-Briggs test would give a subject a 1-in-4 chance of being placed in the correct category (although as I understand it the test actually uses 16). It is not feasible that I fit neatly into one of 1,728 personality types, whereas all standard personality tests do not give absolute categories, but percentages which allow for people to straddle groups. Further, the Myers-Briggs test relies on subjects answering questions about themselves, and draws conclusions from that data based on aggregate samples of a large population. By contrast astrology draws conclusions from the stars, and applies them to people based on nothing more than the coincidence of their birthday. Rather than people determining the range of possible personalities (which is what we do tacitly in everyday life when meeting another person for the first time, with a large degree of success), astrologers cherry pick from a pool of personalities and apply them to people according to the rigid and arbitrary rule of celestial mechanics. As Dawkins showed, a reading for one star sign such as Capricorn has the same predictive value for an individual of a different zodiac, as for the person actually born in January.
Am I bothered by Dawkins calling me names? Not really. I'm in some esteemed company - Resurgence publisher Satish Kumar, and Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (and the Queen's physician) - also fall under Dawkins' stony disapproval.Declaring himself unaffected by being called names, he nevertheless decides to name them instead, assuming we will be impressed where he was not. So, in keeping with this intelligent tactic, let us name names back at him: Pinker, Crick, Maxwell, Darwin, Kelvin, Einstein...Actually, rather than going on with this squabbling, which is conducted on the level of a playground argument, lets switch to some serious empirical scrunity:
Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.I'm not sure which study Spencer was thinking of in asserting that animals respond to homeopathy. It certainly wasn't the large-scale, double-blind, placebo controlled trial on dairy herds in Sweden in 2003, which found no evidence of effect, but a "considerable risk to animal welfare" in the continuing use of the treatment. Nor was it this study from the Veterinary Record in 2006. Or this one from Oslo. Or this from Canada. In fact, if you use Google Scholar to search for "homeopathy animal placebo," you will be hard pressed to discover any of the evidence Neil Spencer cites (or, rather, fails to cite, given that he gives no further references).
Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.Now instead of tackling Spencer by evidence, I'm just getting angry. That bloody medical science, always so pernickity when deciding whether or not to produce expensive quantities of a drug and release it into a large medical population; so annoyingly demanding in its tests for the effectiveness of alternative therapies. There is certainly a case for containing the burden of proof on medical trials, and separating responsibility for testing from the pharmaceutical companies which produce the treatments (Goldacre himself comments on this in The Guardian this week). But in the meantime, I'm not sure I trust the coin-toss method.
The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent.True. But according to a study in the quacks' journal Homeopathy, the success rate of that alternative therapy is around 70 per cent, so not much better than mainstream medicine. (Though the study asked patients who had paid for and received homeopathic treatment - with no placebo control - whether they thought their condition had improved. Surprise, surprise, having handed over wads of cash, many of them did.) And when you consider that most mainstream medicine will often be treating otherwise chronic, life-threatening illness, whereas homeopathy will tend not to be used by people lying incapacitated in intensive care wards, the apparently lower success rate of some approved drugs is understandable.
Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.It is noticeable that all these scientists date from before the eighteenth century, and it is entirely consistent with theories of paradigm shift that the new scientific methodology did not immediately replace the old, supernaturalist speculations. Today, four hundred years on, and having consistently proved its superiority, one would hope that the scientific revolution has been completed.
Labels: astrology, Bad Science, Enemy of Reason, homeopathy, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture
Labels: Britney Spears skirt flash, Technology
One of my favourite proverbs about the joys and struggles of writing comes from Walter Benjamin: ""In the areas with which we are concerned, insight only occurs as a lightning bolt. The text is the thunder-peal rolling long behind." Inspiration, when everything suddenly becomes clear, is a mere flash in the process of creativity, and everything after is the solemn grumble of getting that one idea onto the page in words (as of the last few weeks, when I seem to be finding writing unaccountably difficult, my intellect certainly seems stuck in this clouded and muggy phrase).
Rereading Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," though, moments of striking illumination abound. Benjamin's opening paragraph meditates on the way Marx's critique of capitalism was a prediction of how it would affect the proletariat, rather than an analysis of its conditions of the day. Coincidentally, read from the twenty-first century, Benjamin's work seems similarly prophetic.
Unlike the hand forgeries which preceded lithography, photography, film and audio recording, Benjamin argues that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries placed art in an era of mechanical reproduction, which necessarily changes our perception of art itself. In particular, Benjamin argues that the "aura" of an original, "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" is depreciated and lost in the reproduction. Further, the authentic work of art had its original value in ritual, and what mattered was the fact of its existence (visible to the spirits) not its display before man. In the age of reproduction, however, art is intended precisely for its own exhibition since the place of its birth, such as a temple or sacred site, is irrelevant when it can be copied and placed in any context; thus an alternative cult – the "theology of art" for the sake of art – is born.
Projecting these ideas, I wonder what Benjamin would have made of modern art. Benjamin observes that "From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense." I suspect he would have welcomed Warhol's cloned visions of Marilyn Munroe or drinks cans as endorsing the concept that in an age of machine printing and photography, there can be no such image that is original, only versions of each other. On the other hand, consider contemporary installation art, which is criticised precisely for its self-indulgence, its theology of itself. Here, works such as Tracy Emin's "My Bed" alienate the masses because it cannot be reproduced for them to observe anywhere or anywhen other than the one particular gallery in which it is installed at that moment. Denying the possibility of mechanical reproduction, this restores the value of the original, precisely because of its dependence on context to give it credence as "art" rather than an artefact of the everyday. Once created and installed in a gallery, there can only be one unmade bed; once any other bed (the one I get out of each morning) is similarly "unmade," it lends value to the original, rather than (as mechanical reproduction does) depreciating or losing the essence of it. As Benjamin observes, "Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority." To unmake a bed, as we are all capable of doing technically, is to acknowledge the "aura" of Emin's original act of unmaking as making a new artwork; it is this awareness that anything attempting to reproduce the original will actually be fake that underlies the comment that "I could have made that" and the counter-argument, "But you didn't".
In the literary arena, as well, Benjamin's work seems prescient, though because of its understanding of the history preceding its moment. Andrew Keen has just written a book entitled The Cult of the Amateur; its subtitle – How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture – implies the empowering of the "cult of the amateur" as a new result of a recent technology which takes the possibility of reproduction to infinity. Keen argues that the world of Web 2.0, in which content is generated by the user rather than the traditional model of a single authoritative producer, calls into question the reliability of information, preventing true creativity and argument from flourishing. But is the age of the blog, You Tube and Wikipedia really as radical as Keen makes out? Here is Benjamin (remember, this is 1936, not 2006):
For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for "letters to the editor." And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man's ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.
Not having read Keen's book (and not sure as a blogger that I want to), I am unable to comment on the validity of his polemic. But Benjamin does reminds us that rather than riding the crest of the radical web in our critiques, we ought to go back much further into the origins of mass (re)production in the nineteenth century. I suspect that Keen's complaints will turn out to have many precursors, and in being too wary of the future he may overlook the fact that he is himself the intellectual product of a collaborative past in which singular authorship was a misnomer.
What captivated me most about Benjamin's essay, however, were his comments on that other key interest on mine besides the literary, photography. Benjamin has much of interest to say on film and the relationship between the actor, camera and the viewer in comparison with that between actor, stage and audience in a theatre; he makes a comparable number of incisive remarks about the still image as well, remarks I hesitate to paraphrase, and thus fail to do justice to the wonderful fluidity of Benjamin's argument. Rather, I would quote one paragraph in full:
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions." Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
That last sentence articulates what excites me most about photography. Whilst I enjoy taking landscapes and nature shots, there is inherent in these a nostalgia, which I identify after reading Benjamin's essay as the loss of the invisible aura of the scene: the context of the walk on which the landscape was shot, the wind in the hair and the cold flush of a cheek momentarily forgotten as a scene unfolds, the excitement of seeing the rare butterfly crossing the path. In contrast, photographing abstractions, using the lens to travel and make accessible the "unconscious optics" of the world, is creative in a way that is in itself original. The camera both isolates the world in its frame, and flattens two of its dimensions (time, and depth). Whilst they may not be the finest images, I love it when I am able to wield this visual scalpel to excise from the original scene, and to create something new, a work of art in the age of digital reproduction. Here are three such examples:
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Labels: Photography and Art, Walter Benjamin
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