The Call it Science

The television advertisements broadcast in the United States by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, launched partly in response to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film, are a poststructuralist's paradigm. In the former film, soft-focus, saturated images of children blowing dandelions, and trains trundling down rural railroads, contrast with dull images of third-world farmers pounding grain. This regression, the film suggests, is what a world would be like without oil (no mention of renewable substitutes here). Its punchline hammers the point home in terms every bit as binary blankly binary as Bush's "you're either with us or against us" ('you're either for the war or a terrorist') speech: "Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." The meaning of words change before the eyes of the reader; even the supposedly absolute and permanent formulas of chemistry metamorphose into rhetoric and ideology.

Secondly, the advert signals once and for all the death of the author(ity), even of science, as a quick look at the background of the "Experts" on the board of the CEI reveals. The President of the CEI has a degree in Mathematics and Political Science; Chair of Energy and Global Warming policy is someone with an MSc from the London School of Economics; the Director of Energy Policy is "working part time toward a Ph.D. in American Government from Catholic University." In my PhD course, my graduate school is always emphasising my need to gain transferable skills; but even though I work in an interdisciplinary field across sciences and arts, I would not claim to qualified to speak with a solid foundation of empirical knowledge on the case of the former. But perhaps unlike in the British university system PhDs in "American Goverment" give one the skills to make accurate and objective scientific claims.

Preceeding these technical criticisms, though, my gut reaction is one of utter despair at the inequality in the battle between science and political ideology. As the CEI so stridently asserts, scientists as a body are not sure precisely how fast climate change is taking place. Even as I type this, the BBC Climate Change Model running silently in my taskbar reminds me that climate change may well be happening faster than some scientists think, but that its effects may also have been over-exaggerated. But these are concerns that are quantitative in type; the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the field are agreed that in our earth is experiencing a qualitative revolution in its climate, one that breaks so radically from past events that, regardless of the details, impacts on life are already being felt.

The unfairness of the playing field in which these scientists must compete against the likes of the CEI is that (as I mentioned in my previous post about Richard Dawkins) for scientists to assume the rhetoric of dogma and politics - which they have to do in this most pressing issue - is for them to open the arena to all-comers. Noting just a few coincidental contentions in the broad canvas of scientific consensus, even opponents with little awareness of scientific practice can argue that, having stepped out of their remit for the objective pursuit of knowledge, scientists are legitimate targets on the assumption that the science as a whole is founded on faith (as in Creationism) or warped by liberal politics (as in relation to global warming).

It leaves me deeply depressed for the lack of respect we have for the Baconian enterprise that has constructed a world in which we live longer, can communicate through the internet and, yes, drive cars. In his weekly column in The Guardian, Ben Goldacre tries in vain to correct some of the media's grotesque perversions of scientific evidence. These often assume that one trial on one particular issue (MMR and autism is a favourite), though it has failed the standards of scientific practice, has the same authority as the rest of scientific evidence on the issue put together, even though the silent majority of scientist have been required to meet high benchmarks of double-blind laboratory testing and peer-reviewed publication. A few years ago, Elton John was awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel damages, following tabloid claims that he was bulimic. It seems to me that we need a similar sort of law to protect scientific knowledge from similarly, but more significant, defamatory abuses.

Postgraduate Diary: Academic Blogs

Just read an article about Scholars Who Blog. Perhaps the top literary blog is Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass, though oddly the list of blogs featured in the article seemed skewed away from traditional humanities intellectuals and towards sociologists. More obvious was the emphasis on U.S. based academics. Perhaps those in the technologically conservative U.K. have yet to cotton on to the power of the blogging phenomenon, though with the lecturers' dispute rapidly degenerating into civil war there should be more than enough to comment on.

A more comprehensive list of scholarly blogs is maintained at Rhetoricia; the best annotated guide to weblogs on general literary topics is at The Complete Review.

Postgraduate Diary: Revisiting Revision

Although I did not have any exams last year, my girlfriend did, and so this is the first spring in a long time when the black stresses of revision have not buzzed either around our kitchen table or in my head, thick and horrible as the swarms of flies that emerge at this time of year. You would think, then, that sitting on the other side of the table in the exam hall as an invigilator would be a pleasant experience, a refreshing dose of shadenfreude. However, sitting exposed at the front, scanning the ranks of hunched heads before me, I think I experience something like a mild case of PTSD. As the spiel plays out of my own mouth - "read the rubric," "don't forget to fill in your exam code," "you have one hour remaining," "fifteen minutes remaining" - I step back momentarily to the other side and my heart races slightly, my palms sweat and, I swear, the skin on the fingers that pinch my pen starts to toughen to blisters.

In reality, though, I have nothing more stressful to do than to hand out spare paper, escort people to the toilet, catch up on my reading or, indeed, write this blog entry. I am also in the position of being able to reflect on the sheer waste of it all. Over the next three weeks, the stationery juggernaut rumbles through academia: mountains of paper are despatched to accumulate in (striking) lecturers' offices; gallons of ink are poured on blank pages; treasury tags, graph paper, forms, lists stand piled on the invigilators' desks; thousands of randomly generated exam codes are etched on minds for a few weeks, then wiped forever. Wasted above all seem the thousands of hours that between them these talented intellects, sportspeople, artists, fundraisers, hell raisers, have spent in the flickering flourescence of the library away from these activities, all for the sake of three hours crunched beneath a small desk, desperately writing the last, dying pages of their university careers on which the value of the whole of the previous three or four years rests.

In the day's of witch hunting there was a classic catch-22 test, brilliantly parodied in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail). In it the accused witch was tossed into a pond with feet and hands bound. If the she floated, the judges believed God had rejected her, proving she was evil. If she sank, however, this showed God's acceptance of her; of course, this also often lead to drowning. This analogy captures what I believe to be the unfair judgements intrinsic to end-of-year exams. Those who have worked steadily and well throughout the year might underperform, whilst those who have not committed time and effort in their studies might spontaneously produce a brilliant script. The judgement of the exams might sink you no matter how good you are.

So why bother? Students hate them; examiners loathe marking them; the only person who benefits is me, getting paid for three hours of "staying vigilant." However, surely Spring would not feel the same without the ritual coming-around of exams. There is something about knowing that this rite of passage, with its standard rubrics and its protocals and its silences, is being undertaken in the same way in every lecture room in this university, in universities up and down the country, for thousands of students. Like England being knocked out of a major sporting event and the Summer hosepipe ban, this is one of our great British moments of the communal moan.

Nevertheless, having made that optimistic point, as I must stop writing now to give the fifteen minute warning, I glad to be watching rather than doing. The "post" that signifies where I am in my university career is a welcome reminder that these events are, for me, finished.

A Critical Tapeworm

I posted a few days ago in praise of Barbara Everett's delicate criticism of Philip Larkin. Now to the opposite end of the spectrum, with some gloriously self-contradictory postmodernist literary theory, that made me throw down the book when I read it. This is Steven Shaviro:

Language is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is not to indicate or communicate any particular content, but merely to perpetuate and replicate itself...language, like a virus or like capital, is in itself entirely vacuous: its supposed content is only a contingent means (the host cell or the particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates for the end of self-valorization and self-proliferation. Apart from the medium, there's no other message.

Perhaps I am misinterpreting or misrepresenting Shaviro here, in which case both of our arguments are actually winners. My inability to comprehend this passage endorses Shaviro's thesis that language is meaningless except as a self-perpetuating system. And my argument that his language is obfuscatory and, where it communicates at all, it undermines itself demonstrates its purposeless nature nowhere better than in the reflections of his literary theory.

But if language really does not communicate any particular content, what is the point of his writing and my reading him (or indeed, you reading this blog) at all? The answer is for the glimpses of those moments that capture in glorious and repellent detail the absurdities, inflected with psychoanalytic symbolism, that abound in readings of the body that are such a popular topic in English studies at the moment:

My "innards" are really a hole going straight through my body; their contents - shit and tapeworm - remain forever outside of and apart from me, even as they exist at my very centre. The tapeworm is more "me" than I am myself.

So far as I know, I don't have one of these egocentric parasites within me. Does this mean I have been thoroughly deconstructed...

Postgraduate Diary: The Perils of Interdisciplinarity

I remember an embarrassing moment in a second-year tutorial on Chaucer, when the tutor asked our group if anyone knew the dates of Shakespeare's birth and death. Though we all had a good general idea, none of us knew them precisely (for the record, it's 1564-1616), and we all felt humiliated before the lecturer's contemptuous glower. Albeit in a more congenial environment, when on Monday nights my girlfriend and I settle down to watch University Challenge, as questions about English Literature start issuing from Jeremy Paxman, apparently directed caustically at me in my living room, my girlfriend's gaze settles on me in expectation of an answer. Often, I get them right; but a significant proportion of the questions I, supposedly an expert in my discipline, get wrong.

I naturally feel some angst at this, but then re-reading C.P. Snow's influential book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution again yesterday cast my ignorance in a different, more amenable light. Snow, angered at the scorn his literary colleagues showered on scientists’ limited reading habits, demanded that literary critics explain the fundamental second law of thermodynamics. Having recently read Hans Christian von Baeyer's excellent, accessible and entertaining history of the law, Heat Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat, I am confident that I could rise to Snow's challenge. I wonder, however, whether my second year Chaucer tutor could; I suspect not.

My tutor implied by his question that no self-respecting English student could know his subject unless he had the dates of the births and deaths of its famous figures at his fingertips. But as English department prospectuses proudly proclaim, studying English literature is not about accumulating raw knowledge but about inculcating the ability to interpret and debate the aesthetic and cultural values of texts. By extension, is there any reason why I should be ashamed of knowing little about the biography of Shakespeare, and quite a lot about the second law of thermodynamics, when my area of research starts with Darwin and runs to contemporary literature, exploring the relationship between sciences and arts? For every University Challenge question I get wrong on literary topics, I possibly get another on scientific history and theories correct. I suspect that for the average Chaucerian scholar, focused on the pre-Englightenment period, this would, understandably, not be the case. Though I would not go so far as to say I am proud not to have known the year Shakespeare was born, I am certainly not ashamed that I know more about one of the fundamental laws of the universe than I do about the details of the most important figure in English literature. Nevertheless, whether sitting in my English department or in my sitting room, the need to assert the value of possessing areas of knowledge drawn from different disciplines is one of the problems of being engaged in interdisciplinary work.

The other danger is less subjective. I realised the other day, as I elbowed my way through the library packed with revision conscious undergraduates, that you know you are engaged in cross-cultural work when a trip to collect books leaves your thighs feeling like they have climbed Everest, as your borrowings take you from the basement (English literature) to the middle (science) and top (social science) floors and down again. I wonder if Health and Safety have been informed of the special physical exertions facing those whose work straddles the two cultures?

A Critical High Light

Anyone believing all modern literary criticism to be as artless and occlusive as the texts it analyses are artful and popular could do worse than to look at Barbara Everett's essay on Philip Larkin in this month's London Review of Books.

Taking the trope of "high windows" from Larkin's last collection, which is named after that image in a poem of the same title, she uses the symbol as itself a window onto Larkin's work and its complex moral psychology. In her study, Everett does as E.M. Forster once requested, and only connects: biographical history with the poetry, late works with early poems, images embedded within poems. But that "only" underestimates the skill of the task she achieves, which is to do as all great criticism can and to convince in its arguments and to widen one's appreciation of the art it scrutinises, through a combination of careful research, empathic close readings, a keen eye for ambiguities and ironies others might miss. She also realises the other potential outcome of critical writing, which is to give voice to what one might not have missed and always sensed, but which even the alert reader is unable precisely to describe. She uses a key adjective that pinpoints perfectly how I have always felt, but never been able to articulate about Larkin, when she finds a characteristic Larkinian humour in the last lines of "Send No Money": "A splutter of laughter, rage, misery, expostulation, acceptance, 'truth.'" That word "splutter" is every bit as artfully chosen as the words of Larkin's original poetry.

As she draws together the web of inferences and influences Everett's essay takes on some of the same qualities of satisfying resolution that are more commonly found in the thriller or detective story. That I feel able, without stretching my point too far, to make that connection between the most populist of literature, and its most prosaic branch in the extended essay, is testament to the exemplary nature of this piece of writing that is more than "only" academic, and which instead assumes some of the qualities of the art it values so highly.

Pequod Poetry

I've spent the afternoon altering the way the Poetry section of The Pequod works, bringing it into a form similar to that of the Photography section. Each poem now has its own unique page, with comments - from both myself and readers - beneath them. I have also, at long last, added some new work. Please take a moment to look at it, and let me know what you think!

Dawkins' Dilemma

I knew he would be the one even before I got in to the hall. As people queued up outside, a man stood handing out leaflets. The man who was sat just in front of me when we eventually sat down, took one leaflet then, after a moments pause, another couple. I could see him, at various moments in the lecture, shaking his head solemnly. Then, when he shifted position, I could just glance over his shoulder to read the telling words in the headline of the website print out he was holding: "God..[line break]...Evolution." As the questions began, the man looked desperately around for the attendants stalking the room with microphones and, eventually, he got his question in: "Thank-you for your talk Mr. Dawkins. You think you have answered the 'How,' but what about the 'Why'?..."

Richard Dawkins certainly pulls them in. The conference hall at the Life Centre at which I saw him lecture was packed with 480 people. Having been lecturing for 30 years, as one of our best- known scientists after the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has a vast spectrum of experience and literature on which to draw. The lecture itself comprised readings, by himself and his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, from some of the most lyrical and passionate passages of his books. Although clearly a model Dawkins had worked on before, it was still entertaining, nice to feel through the delivery which parts of his numerous books he held most pride in. It was, however, towards the unknown of the subsequent questions that expectation was directed. When the issue of Intelligent Design arose, the breath seemed to stop for a moment, in anticipation.

However, there was none of that frisson that sometimes enlivens the moments after a lecture when a sudden incisive question puts the academic on the spot and the encounter (as I commented in my post about Steve Grand) takes on the quality of intellectual theatre. Through a few, clearly well-rehearsed analogies, Dawkins reinforced the grounds for dismissing Intelligent Design on which most people in the room already stood, judging from the applause after his response. Creationism appears little more than a dull ache rather than a thorn in the side of this scientist.

However, he had clearly failed to sway his questioner, who continued solemnly shaking his head for the rest of the evening. It strikes me that he probably never will succeed in contesting his opponents, since the problem Dawkins faces in this country as public enemy number one of Intelligent Design is very paradoxical. Here we have one of the most brilliant public communicators of science, who has perhaps done more than any other to make the deep insights of scientists such as E.O. Wilson available to the general audience through his literary use of metaphor and anecdote. However, he has perhaps been so successful in producing a poetics of evolutionary science that people do not feel compelled to read beyond the superficial rhetoric of "selfish genes," "replicators," "memes." They are not driven to seek fully to understand the science and to recognise that the fact that biology seems to occupy a despotic control over us, consciousness, language and all, is actually a powerful clarion call for us to harness the potential of culture, conscience, literature (and religion?) to subvert the tyranny of our genetic self-centredness. His complaint in the preface to the new edition of The Selfish Gene about those who read the language but who do not engage with the content is plaintive, but I think ultimately futile; even at the hands of those commentatating from a non-religious perspective, he will forever be a victim of his own successful use of metaphor.

When confronted by the challenge of creationism, that claims evolutionary theory as being itself a faith, thus competing on terms comparable with its own Christian beliefs, how should he respond? As the historian Lisa Jardine has pointed out through a very useful historical illustration in the BBC programme A Point of View, the balance is impossibly set: science needs and is expected to produce a great array of evidence for one theory, and indeed should be suspicious of any evidence that fits the theory without any ambiguity whatsoever. As Dawkins noted, as in a court science is directed only towards demonstrating things beyond reasonable doubt, providing explanations that are acceptable, and it neither could not nor should attempt to provide the entire narrative. (Alternatively, as Descartes put it in Discourse on Method, "It is truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.") Creationism contends that it needs only to highlight one ambiguous point in evolutionary theory to open up the space for it to wedge itself as a counter argument, promising what science can not: ultimate belief beyond any doubt whatsoever, with all the enticing possibilities (As Pascal argued, the stakes of infinite life after death are too high to risk holding atheistic doubts in this world). The aesthetic component to Dawkins' achievements leaves him very open to be tackled by competing epistemologies through the emotionally-resonant framework narratives such as Creationism offer.

Should Dawkins then evade this conflict by reversing Creationism's treatment of science as if a religion, and treat religion as if a science? Should he demonstrate the vast extent of evidence in favour of evolutionary theory - genetics, the fossil record, artificial life experiments, the Drake equation, behavioural psychology, biology - and tackle religious assertions on similar terms, showing how, for example, the ark could not have been built because it could not float? The trouble with this approach is that, firstly, it admits that creationism might, in theory at least, have something rational lurking behind the symbolism of the Biblical text, empirical data which might legitimately be applied to evolution. Secondly, it gets mired too deeply in the science, and takes away from Dawkins' traditional position as a communicator to the layman who - most happily in my case - can understand his theories with very little scientific background at all.