what we've got

Identical twins - 1967 - Diane Arbus (Copyright Arbus Estate)

For some, photography isn’t quite art because it simply captures reality. There is no artifice in many shots, no craft: the world comes together in a moment of specific configuration, more or less outside of an artist’s intent, and a photographer simply points the camera and – click! Art is made. Or isn’t, since the artist has very little to do. There isn’t the sheer hard work that goes in to, say, a painting or a novel. We might feel – ‘I could have done that!’ And indeed we could, if all photography means is to point and click.

Diane Arbus‘ photo ‘Identical Twins‘ shows us in a very immediate way that photography can do more than that. On one level we have a photo of two very similar girls. However, despite their clear resemblance we quickly notice differences: one girl is frowning a little while the other smiles; one pair of eyes is hooded, the other clear and open; the hands are slightly different, the hair; and so on. And as we notice those differences, we interpret those them as significant and meaningful: we might say that one child is happy; one less prim and proper than the other; one more dominant, and so on. We might then go on to think about the nature of identity, of how uniqueness triumphs uniformity. We find meaning in gaps, the differences between the two girls.

This process of finding ‘meaning in the gaps’ also lends itself to discovering the ‘art’ in photography. In this way of thinking, the similarity is not between two subjects but between the photograph and the reality it represents. The gaps are those elements where the photographer has introduced an element of creativity, artifice, illusion, call it what you will. In the above example, there are many examples. First, the photographer has assembled the two girls in a certain pose, emphasising the same hairstyle, clothes and so on. This helps us in seeing the differences – and finding the meanings – between the two subjects. It’s clearly not just a slice of life, although it might include that.

But note the junction between wall and floor: it is at an angle, higher on the left compared to the right. This is deliberate. We might interpret this as saying: what seems a balanced portrait is actually askew; although seemingly identical, our immediate perceptions are upset by the uncertainty that their differences bring; that the photograph wants to destabilise our preconceptions about what it means to be the same and yet not the same; that ultimately what seems to be a simple capturing of reality is really the product of the artist-photographer intent.

Reading photographs like this is underpinned by two central ideas. The first is that there is no such as thing as an ‘innocent’ photograph, that is, one taken without any kind of artifice or creativity. Even when taking holidays snaps we don’t just point and click: we might frame the face so the top of the head of our subject is not cut off; we’re told to put the main subject to one side to promote a sense of harmony, create some interest. The second central idea, following from the first, is that even the smallest details are often there deliberately. In ‘Identical Twins’, the slant of the junction between the wall and floor is deliberately significant, as we’ve seen.

What we have in this photo is a metaphor for the relationship between art and reality. Where two very similar images (ideas, symbols, techniques) are placed in close proximity it is likely that we will find differences between them. It is in those differences that the meaning lie. ‘Identical Twins’ (it’s title at once both plainly descriptive but, as we’ve seen, highly charged with meaning) by Diane Arbus is one of those key photographs that tell us more about the relationship between photography and reality, and between photography and art.

Postscript
If you find this image a little unsettling there are good reasons for it. Our minds are programmed to identify the human face. When we see slight discrepancies between the real and the near-real, as we might most often in Japanese ‘humanoid’ robots or ultra-realistic computer games, we enter the ‘uncanny valley’, that phase of interpretation where an image appears strange,   Here, the differences between two ‘identical’ twins remind us of that disjunct. It is also the starkness of the black and white; the unfussy background which focusses our attention; the confrontational quality implied by the pose and gaze direct to the viewer. The film director Stanley Kubrick would later use a similar image for the murdered twins in his ‘The Shining’.

Penguins Stopped Play

[Spoilers ahead] I’ve just finished Harry Thompson‘s ‘Penguins Stopped Play‘, a book about cricket and travel, in that order. Most of you will like one and not the other of these two subjects (no prizes for guessing which). But, as with so many things that are lovingly made, intelligently crafted and passionately expressed it has a significance beyond its deceptively simple approach. In this case, it is as much about what it means to live than an account of a team of amateur cricketers who decide to play a match in every continent. This is partly because Thompson died shortly after finishing the book, at only 45.

I knew before reading the book that Thompson had died and I suppose I had some kind of mawkish interest in what happened to someone so young, an age I’m approaching. I found it almost impossible to pick it up and not turn to the final pages, where he writes without sentiment (but with a touching metaphor of the slip fielders lining up waiting to catch him) about his inoperable cancer. In a final chapter his wife briefly writes about his death and funeral. She hears the thunk of a cricket ball land in his coffin, dropped there by the members of the team he captained: entirely appropriate, she tells us, as she had already placed a bat in his hands.

But rather than sadness in the pages that preceded those I found a joyous affirmation of someone living as they wanted, fulfilling their passion, squeezing some of the zest from life. The death of one of the book’s many colourful characters, a beloved cricketer who passes at the batman’s crease just as he is about to score his hundred, foreshadows Thompson’s own life cut lamentably short. And inevitably, as the pages thin out and stop, we turn attention upon ourselves and our loved ones and remember, too, that our lives will end. And as we do, we remind ourselves of how we should try to make our lives as happy, loving and passionate as we can, just as Thompson appears to in this unlikely book about cricket and travel, in that order.

For me, Thompson has become one of those writers you want to call by their first name, as if you know them. Thanks, Harry.

My wife Jennie recently told me a anecdote about a stint working as a waitress in Canada, a period in which she made ends meet whilst she studied. In the restaurant, there used to be a box passed around into which the patrons could drop their tip, hidden from the rest of the group. One tip would reappear with wearying familiarity and that tip would be a scrap of paper upon which was written: don’t eat the yellow snow.

No doubt suffering from l’esprit de l’escalier I suggested that my tip would be a perhaps more serious, even pompous one: ‘stop being offended’. I think, like irony and innocence (which are another matter), that being offended has become a real blight on the relationships in our everyday and cultural life and at its worst threatens one of humanity’s greatest achievements, free speech. Or rather, as the writer Philip Pullman reminds us with his pithy, eloquent and beautifully pitched response, you don’t have the right to live without taking offence:

Just as we have the right to publish our thoughts and feelings – and we do, now that we blog, and Tweet and share so keenly – we are equally subject to those thoughts and feelings being criticised, from which offence might arise. We show our strength through our reaction to criticism, where it falls on the right side of a law that embraces free speech.

Is there a text in this class?

It seems self-evident to think that our tastes in literature and our interpretation of texts is grounded in our unique selves. The meaning and effect we find in reading is the sum of our parts, or even more so, created and sustained through an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated configuration of our individual personality, experiences and background.

I remember hearing as a child that each snowflake had a unique design, and later seeing that most wonderfully demonstrated in those unforgettable photos of microscopically-enhanced individual snowflakes, their geometric, symmetrical details organised into mind-boggingly endless possibilities. And then being told – you’re as unique as that snowflake, beautiful and individual.

Thinking more broadly, such beliefs are probably sustained through a necessity of considering ourselves as individuals, a sign of how far our ego protects us by identifying us as special amongst a morass of different, sometimes competing, external forces, including other people. Whatever the reason, it’s permeated our culture for some time, and we may remember finding it illustrated in the snowflake example from our shared cultural heritage.*

You might reasonably think that as a unique snowflake (leaving the beauty aside) that there would be very little consensus when it comes to interpretation. Following this through, as individuals, we experience meaning and effect as relative to our persona. Extended logically, we should all generate different interpretations, have different tastes, given that we have uniquely individual lives.

But we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes (at least when it comes to interpretation of literary texts).

Some time ago, the literary critic and theorist Stanley Fish ran some experiments with his class to see the extent to which they agreed on details of the texts they read. (His experiment and results can be read in his work, Interpreting the Variorum and the brilliantly titled, Is There a Text in this Class?). What he found, in brief, was that there was a large degree of consensus within what became known as ‘interpretative communities‘. These communities shared common ideas, backgrounds, experiences: they might, for example, have taken a class on Romantic Poets before they read Blake; or their economic and social circumstances may have been similar; they may also be aware of the authorial intent (although the usefulness of this is another matter). Fish’s work is quite old now, but it’s still relevant, and highly influential.

Despite the division of people into communities, his work shows us that our interpretations and tastes are largely a product of the social groups in which we sit – our ‘uniqueness’ does not, at least in these terms, extend to an indivisible relativistic singular – a person, a ‘unique and beautiful snowflake’. This helps explain why some books become classics, or even that some are published at all – because an agent or publisher will decide what they think the market will like. That market is just another interpretative community. What is more, those books, when published, are no less subject to the writer’s own contract with his or her interpretative community; ideas, inspiration and so on are a product too of the community in which the writer belongs (the notion of intertextuality is useful here).

It doesn’t mean that our take on books and our reading is not valuable, not least to ourselves. Rather, it means that your reading in a broader sense is a product of the interpretative communities – for there will be more than one – in which you reside. Reading (and writing), far from being a solitary endeavour, might be more social than we first think.

* In this case I mean, a Western one; I suspect but don’t know for sure if this idea exists elsewhere in quite the same way.

It’s an adage of public relations that ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’, as if simply being in the public memory ensures the kind of success that leads to profits.

That can’t be. I remember Jeffrey Archer, Anthea Turner and wasshername – that gun-toting, twitching, winking, hockey mom… ah, yes, Sarah Palin – but no matter how large a chunk of valuable memory I inadvertently devote to them, it will never convince me they are valuable for anything other than how to get things woefully wrong. Is remembering someone or company for their huge failures really useful to them?

I doubt it, as the recent example of Neal’s Yard tells me.

I will forever remember Neal’s Yard, purveyor of expensive homeopathic potions and lotions, for their huge PR error in failing to answer many of the questions fired at them during a Guardian live debate. They forgot that the public can be a taxing lot, firing all sorts of awkward questions about how far the efficacy of these ‘remedies’ can be proven scientifically.

I’ll remember, too, being prompted to go online and find further evidence of how Neal’s Yard struggle to find what they might call a ‘PR solution’ to the inestimable problem of their claim that certain remedies can help prevent one of the world’s most deadly of diseases, malaria.

It’s these connections between memory and experience that prevent us from making the same mistakes twice. Bad publicity is a reminder that not all products and services – and ethics – are created equally and this bears no relation to the amount of infamy they occupy in our collective consciousness: lest we forget.

Adam Curtis

Whilst reading Surowiecki, Leadbeater et al it’s easy to get carried away with the notion that the crowd is, overall, smarter than the individual. It’s an impressively pithy idea that’s sometimes counter-intuitive, and so sticks easily in our minds, despite these writers and others reminding us that it’s not always the case.

An antidote to crowd wisdom can be found in the work of the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. He has made several films on a variety of themes including the role of psychology in The Century of the Self; the use of Cold War theory in modern economics in The Trap; and the uses of fear to control countries of people in perhaps his most notable series of films, The Power of Nightmares. All of these films are freely available on the net, including on YouTube.

Despite the different themes, Curtis has an underlying thread which runs throughout his films: the deliberate manipulation of large numbers of people by the very few. In The Century of the Self, those people are American consumers in a free market, controlled by, amongst others, the father of public relations Edward Bernays.

Edward Bernays

Bernays was a significant character in twentieth century economics whose influence remains pervasive. Building on the Freudian approach that the subconscious powerfully sought to satisfy its base desires, he believed he could tap into that process to make people think they needed his product.

When cigarette manufacturers approached him complaining not enough women were smoking, he used a psychological mechanism common in women to increase sales. In 1950s American smoking was a male activity, especially in public, and taboo to women on the whole. Recognising the recent influence advances in women’s suffrage, Bernays hit upon the idea that cigarettes could represent ‘Torches of Freedom‘, a protest at male dominance. Women would smoke because they were free to, because they were now emancipated and powerful.

Bernays had several dozen well-dressed, young women smoke at The New York City parade in 1929 in front of carefully assembled newspaper photographers. As a direct result sales of cigarettes to women soared and there was a rise in the number of women smoking in public. The success was attributed to a wholesale change in perceptions of the cigarette as a male domain to one that represented a powerful need: freedom of expression. It was one of the most successful campaigns of all time, and still is used as an examplar for those interested in PR.

What this tells us is that the crowd can be manipulated by a single person with an influential idea. In order to achieve this, the crowd has been reduced to one common element – in this case their attitude towards smoking – which is then subverted through control of their shared belief system and psychological processes. By allowing themselves to be manipulated the crowd were unwise. Curtis cites several more examples, from the pervasive influence of religion on millions of believers to modern politicians – in The Power of Nightmares – controlling whole countries, continents even, through a force equally as powerful as the desire to consume: fear.

Gradually, and as these kinds of example of mass manipulation become more explicit and understood, we’ve become more sceptical about how politicians and public relations work. It’s hard to imagine Bernays’ stunt working now in quite the same way. But without the perceived and recorded influence of the few over the many there would be no advertising, no public relations and no unnecessary and ubiquitous consumption. When this is at odds with the authentic requirements of the people, you and me included, it’s evidence of the unwisdom of the crowd.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.         Donald Rumsfeld

Another world is possible

Martin Weller has written a though provoking blog post on the possibility that sometimes it’s detrimental to have too much information. It builds on the work of James Surowiecki on the wisdom of crowds and applies to Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq. Martin argues that many people were opposed to the war because they had too little information. Blair, on the other hand, had too much and faltered under its weight. To quote Martin’s post:

Blair had an excess of information, while the crowd, deprived of all the intelligence reports he was privy to, had been forced to see the salient features of the war, and had instinctively judged it to be ‘wrong’. […] In short, Blair suffered from a deficit of ignorance, which enabled the crowd, lacking the vast quantity of (meaningless) intelligence to isolate the significant factors in the build up to the war.

One way of approaching this is to think of what happens when we don’t have too much information. One suggestion raised in Martin’s post, implicitly perhaps, is the role instinct, and its bedfellow intuition, play in decision making. It’s implied that an absence of information leads to an action based upon instinct and intuition rather than rational consideration: the people “instinctively judged it to be ‘wrong’”. Despite an acknowledgement that instinct plays a part in our daily life, there are clear problems with the irrational approach it creates; and I don’t think anyone would suggest that a war could be waged on a ‘hunch’. So clearly we need some information.

So how do we know when we’ve got too much? Perhaps the answer is that you can only have too much information when a decision is wrongly made because there was too much information… ah, hold on, that’s circular and won’t do. There will never be a case when it’s not true.

This tempts us to try to quantify the amount of information at which a mistake is inevitable. This is difficult. Try answering this kind of question: when does a man become bald? Is their a tipping point at which what’s recognised as a head full of hair suddenly becomes bald? Probably not, just as we can’t say Blair reading 99 documents is fine, as long as he doesn’t read 100. So we can’t put a number on it. But that’s ok, because we can often speak about things that we can’t quantify or define: we still have baldness and we still have art, respectively.

What’s more problematic is how far the idea of having too much information isn’t so much the product of deduction but of induction. In other words, it’s not a repeatable, observable phenomenon that based upon a rational investigative process. We can’t possibly hope to know even some of the many variables involved in the journey to war and so we can’t possibly suggest with any certainty that too much information is a root or central cause of Blair’s mistake. In a recent elaboration on the problem, Martin suggests that having too little information may sometimes lead to innovation because some are stifled by rules and expectations. (This is a different kind of information from that in the Blair example; I haven’t touched upon that difference here, despite its importance.)

But we can’t be sure that is the cause because we haven’t… got enough information. Besides, innovation has taken place in areas where a great deal of information is present (just as innovation doesn’t take place where there is too little information, too). The problem is when we’re finding out information is that there are things that we know; things that we don’t; things that we know we know and things that we don’t know we don’t know. We will never know some things and other things we’ll never know that we never knew them. This is why Rumsfeld, for all his faults, is on to something.

It is the job of politicians, aided by their public staff, to pursue the ends of knowledge in order that the effect of the unknowns does not unduly affect the result of the decision making process. So, Blair can’t leave it to chance that the thing he doesn’t know might tip the scales (what he knows he doesn’t know); or that there is an avenue he’s yet to pursue of which he’s so far unaware (what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know).

We could therefore argue is that Blair had too little information, for if he knew what the crowd knew then he wouldn’t have acted as he did. More probably is that he knew but ignored it, and that’s where individual judgement comes in. But in order to learn this doesn’t mean that he needed to unlearn everything else. The motives, thoughts and feelings of the crowd, like everything else, can be distilled and presented as evidence amongst a store of other evidence – which he can choose to listen to or ignore.

It’s implied that ignorance – in Martin’s case, the absence of exposure of the crowd to military intelligence – inculcates a more straightforward process of decision making, one that, unfettered by the complexities of competing paths, is somehow more authentically engaged with the truth. But I don’t think that such simplicity is true or desirable, not least because it will give ill-informed politicians a chance to wriggle out of uncomfortable questions about the decisions they make. Ignorance might be bliss but it’s not a firm footing for political decisions.

I’m clearly doing Martin’s post a disservice when I take issue with a number of points a short blog post like his cannot possibly deal with. I might be guilty, too, of focussing too intently on the idea of instinct, which wasn’t the point of Martin’s post I don’t think. In another blog discussion on Martin’s ideas which claims that lack of an adequate filter is the problem, not the information itself (but which amounts to the same thing – too much information) he suggest he might ‘expand on this in a blog post’ and maybe even a book. There is certainly room for one.

It’s Charles Darwin’s birthday today, 12 February – a special one, since it’s the bicentennial of his birth. I was lucky enough to recently visit the Darwin exhibition in London’s Natural History Museum. It was a small exhibition but contained some fascinating artefacts, including a mock-up of his study. I learned that he added casters to his chair so he wouldn’t have to get up to fetch his notes and books spread around the room and therefore risk exacerbating one of his many ailments. What’s more, he was perpetually covered in blankets, even in the summer, because he was always cold.

What was striking about the collection was its outline of the enormous adventures he undertook when traveling on The Beagle. A huge wall chart traced his path around the world and back again, and included hotspots where he witnessed events as various as riots or earthquakes and almost everything in between.

The fish came first: 'Blue Whale' Room at the Natural History Museum

Although by all accounts he was a rather timid man he threw himself into the adventure completely. One story tells us that he hunted with a tribe in South America and managed to entwine his hunting bolas around the legs of his own horse, sending him tumbling. We’re told once he dusted himself off, he laughed along with the locals at his mishap: it’s certainly clear that he made many friends along the way, and felt great affection for many of those he met.

We learned, too, that his theories on evolution and their clear opposition to Christian creationism jarred with family and friends, including his wife. The death of his young daughter left him scarred and he was prone to severe panic attacks. His is very human story, fitting for a man who fortified humanism – and all its frailties, wonder and complexities – replacing it firmly at the centre of modern and contemporary experience.