Author: Ophelia Benson

On a lighter note. (Lighter than what? What could be lighter than Andrew Ross? Okay not lighter then, just different.) I have a staggering piece of news for everyone. Are you sitting down? Because this is a real shocker, and so new and fresh and unfamiliar – you just can’t think how new. Ready? Okay here it is.

Americans don’t get irony.

You didn’t know that, did you. You’ve never ever heard that before, have you. That’s not a stupid boring worn-out stale dull flat endlessly-recycled tedious cliché, is it! No indeed. No, you only hear that some three times in every BBC arts programme, that’s all.

I do beg your pardon. How unbecoming. And unironic. But there it is, you see – I don’t get irony. Never have. It’s a closed book to me. Comes of being born in New York, you see, that well-known haven of flat-footed wide-eyed literalness and naiveté.

No it’s just that I heard that particular gem of folk wisdom three times in one day last week. It’s just that it’s gotten so I can hear it coming, and prepare to roll my eyes. The minute one of the boffins on ‘Front Row’ or ‘Saturday Review’ comments on a certain sentimentality or fatuity in a new American movie, I know the next sentence is going to be the one about how Americans don’t do irony. Followed by a Tweedle-dum-Tweedledee-esque group hug. ‘Aren’t we cool, aren’t we great, aren’t we swell, we get irony and those poor pathetic dweebs across the pond don’t, not one of them, they’re all Biblical literalists and every other kind of literalists to boot.’

Gross exaggeration, I know. Well that’s what I do instead of irony, you see – hyperbole. I always do that. (And, I have to admit, a lifelong habit of doing that has revealed to me that some Americans do indeed not get irony, in the sense that I have had people of that nationality owlishly correct or question obvious hyperbole. ‘Was he really ten feet tall?’ Uh – no.) But if other people are allowed to do irony, then I’m allowed to do hyperbole. There’s a law on the books about it. I’d show you but I’m too busy.

One of the funny (possibly even ironic) things about the three in one day is that one of them was so very old. Two were from ‘Saturday Review’ but the other was from an ancient Morse I happened to watch on tv – one from 1991. Some guy tells Morse he’s going back to Princeton and it will be so nice and restful because Americans don’t do irony. Oh really! Princeton’s an irony-free zone, is it! Well I grew up there, and that’s news to me. In fact it’s bollocks.

To be fair, one of the two mentions on ‘Saturday Review’ was saying the same thing. Good old Tom Sutcliffe pointed out that it’s not that there’s no irony in the US, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed. It may be a bit scarce in Nebraska, he said mildly, but there’s a lot of it on the coasts. Well exactly.

I’ve been slightly touchy about this for years – decades in fact. Ever since reading a long windy pompous self-congratulatory novel by John Fowles, Daniel Martin, which went on and on and on about how Americansdon’tdoirony. Even the clever ones, even the clever and funny ones, even the very clever and funny ones – even they don’t do irony. Whereas, apparently, all Ukanians, however dim and unfunny, do irony like polecats. I hadn’t a clue what he meant by it, which I thought might possibly indicate that it was true and that I too did not do irony. That it was like those notes that only dogs can hear, or sonic thingies that only dolphins can detect – that I simply couldn’t even recognize it, let alone appreciate it or smile at it or deploy it myself.

Well. That was a long time ago, and I’ve long since realized that Fowles was talking self-flattering crap. (And after that review of his diaries in the LRB the other month, I have serious doubts about his talent in the irony department, frankly.) Yes, granted, of course, a lot of our movies are full of sentimental bilge, but I’m such an ironist that I don’t go see them, so they don’t implicate the whole population, now do they. And granted our presidential campaigns are full of even more sentimental and utterly irrelevant bilge (Vote for me, I have a dog!), but – um – well never mind what. But we can too so do irony. We just don’t always happen to feel like it.

Just a bit more. Because I promised, and because there are more that are too good not to share.

…it is perhaps worth drawing an analogy between the demarcation lines in science and the borders between hierarchical taste cultures – high, middlebrow, and popular – that cultural critics and other experts involved in the business of culture have long had the vocational function of supervising. In both cases, we find the same need for experts to police the borders with their criteria of inclusion and exclusion…[F]alsifiability is often put forward as a criterion for evaluating scientific authenticity…But such a yardstick is no more objectively adequate and no less mythical a criterion than appeals to, say, aesthetic complexity have been in the history of cultural criticism. Falsifiability is a self-referential concept in science, inasmuch as it appeals to those normative codes of science that favor objective authentification of evidence by a supposedly dispassionate observer.

Isn’t that lovely? There’s so much in it. It’s like a big ol’ treasure chest. That ‘it is perhaps worth drawing’ – more of that caginess our sharp-eyed readers have noticed. Sure, ‘perhaps’ – that’s safe to say. Then again perhaps not. And ‘worth’? Well, that depends what you mean by ‘worth’. If you mean in the sense of ‘worth because likely to produce interesting, true, useful lines of thought,’ then no. If you just mean ‘more fun than having your teeth cleaned,’ possibly. Okay and then ‘demarcation lines’. Right. That’s what science is all right, it’s kind of like a football field. And then borders. He has a bit of an obsession with borders, Ross does. He seems to think that every distinction and every value judgement (except the ones he makes) equates to establishing and patrolling borders in a peculiarly compulsive, anal, property-hugging, pedantic way. And then ‘supervising’ to underline the point. Right – people who pay attention to culture (slightly more perspicuous attention than Ross pays, one hopes) spend all their time supervising borders; that’s what ‘culture’ is all about. And then, skipping lightly over several more lovely items (experts, police the borders, criteria, inclusion and exclusion) we come to that loopy phrase about falsifiability. Put forward? Scientific authenticity? Oh never mind. And then all the rest of it, all that bilge about normative codes and ‘a self-referential concept’ and ‘objective’ and ‘authentification’ (he seems to have science confused with stamp-collecting) and ‘supposedly’. I’m exhausted now.

But just a little more, because there is one very sly item.

A more exhaustive treatment would take account of the local, qualifying differences between the realm of cultural taste and that of science –

Oh it would! It would notice those differences would it? Well that is a relief!

– science, but it would run up, finally, against the stand-off between the empiricist’s claim that non-context-dependent beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the culturalist’s claim that beliefs are only socially accepted as true.

There, that’s the one. That’s what Susan Haack calls the ‘passes for’ fallacy. That’s that rhetorical trick where epistemic relativists substitute the word ‘beliefs’ for words like ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ and hope we won’t notice. And he follows that up with our last sentence for today.

Ultimately, the power of science rests upon making and maintaining that distinction, and we ought to recognize that science’s anxiety about authenticating its belief in truths is, in the truly Foucauldian sense, a question of power.

There you have it – the making of a celebrity cultural critic.

A little more. Because it’s hard to resist. Because there are just so many – um – interesting remarks.

To set the scene. Ross once attended what he calls a New Age trade convention, and gives us his thoughts on the subject.

The more official and centered voice of condemnation against the New Age community can be found in what are often charaterized as the witch-hunting activities of CSICOP…CSICOP is an international ‘inquisition’ of mostly academic ghostbusters, set up…to police the boundary between science and pseudoscience contested by a host of New Age alternatives to institutional scientific orthodoxies.

Same again. Official, ‘centered’ (huh?), witch-hunting (!!), inquisition, police, boundary, institutional, orthodoxies. All that in 1.5 sentences. Talk about over-egging the pudding (or over-egging the omelette, as the Alternative Idiom Community likes to call it). And then on the other hand (cue friendly music): community, contested, alternatives. That’s another way Ross is like Harding, despite the superficial differences in style: he’s what you might call insistent. He doesn’t have much to say, so he resorts to saying it over and over again. He says community, alternative, marginal, contested as often as he possibly can, and orthodoxy, official, authority, dominant, even oftener. Maybe one day we’ll get the point and change over from authoritative science to the New Age kind. Yupuhuh, gonna do that, fer sher.

But such exposés of paranormal activities, whether in dry polemics or showbiz, are always conducted through appeals to the kind of experimental certification that rationalist science has established as the single standard of truth and reason in our dealings with the natural world. In this respect, they might be seen as affirmations of faith in the world-view of a particular culture…

Well that’s wrong, for a start; ‘rationalist’ science has not established ‘experimental certification’ as the single standard of truth and reason; that’s just bollocks. And that tired crap about affirmations of faith – well, it’s tired crap, that’s what. Sure, they might be seen as that, because anything might be seen as anything. But that don’t make it true.

Sandra Harding had her time in the limelight; now it’s Andrew Ross’ turn. Fair’s fair. All children are talented, all children are special, all have something to say, we must listen politely to all of them and not make some feel bad and excluded and marginalized and of low worth by ignoring them. Nor must we throw the little bastards out of school merely because they threatened or assaulted a teacher, unless a gun or a knife was used. Once again, fair’s fair. Exclusion damages the academic performance of people who are excluded (except when it doesn’t), therefore it is important to avoid exclusion except in the most extreme of cases. A child who shoots up the classroom with an AK-47 would probably do better in another environment, but short of that, it’s all love and inclusion and extra attention for the dear little mischief-makers. But that’s another subject. We were talking about hip trendy Andrew Ross.

It’s interesting reading Ross right after Harding, because in a way he is far more sophisticated than she is, but in another way he isn’t. There is a veneer of sophistication of sorts in his writing – in the style rather than the substance – that is very different from the way Harding writes. You don’t keep getting that dismayed feeling that you’re reading the work of a small child, or at best a teacher of small children who has forgotten how to write for grown-ups. No, you can tell this guy is an adult, all right, and that he’s been around, he knows what’s what, he knows how to push the buttons and impress the right-on. But a veneer is all it is. It’s about a millimeter thick; it’s all surface. The content is just as dopy as what Harding says. And there’s almost as much self-betrayal. There is for instance the way Ross informs us that he’ll be taking a good hard look at the rhetoric of science, while all the time he is peddling nothing but rhetoric himself. That’s exactly why his writing seems so silly: it’s so obvious, the way he simply relies on sly emotive language in place of evidence or argument – and yet he fancies himself a debunker of rhetoric! It’s a joke, and one that he seems to be blithely unaware of. So not as sophisticated as he’d like to think. Apparently he’s quite good-looking though, so that’s all right.

You’ll be wanting some examples.

While I occasionally analyze the language, philosophy, and rhetoric of the dominant scientific claims, my chief interest lies in describing how various scientific cultures – sublegitimate, alternative, marginal, or oppositional – both embody and contest these claims in their cultural activities and beliefs…I have devoted a good deal of attention…to alternative cultures like New Age that are subordinate, marginal, or opposed to official scientific cultures governed by the logic of technocratic and corporate decision-making.

There, that’s good, don’t you think? See what I mean? On the one hand you have ‘cultures’ that are marginal, oppositional, alternative, subordinate, opposed, sublegitimate (do you begin to get his drift, or is it too subtle?), and on the other you have ‘cultures’ that are dominant, official, governed (ew) by the logic (oh no not that) of technocratic (urrgh) and corporate (ow!) decision-making (fascists!). Impressive stuff.

Consequently I focus on how the authority of dominant scientific claims is respected and emulated even as it is contested by apprentices, amateurs, semi-legitimates, and outlaws who are detached in some degree from the authoritative institutions of science.

That’s a great one. Notice how he manages to refer to ‘authority’ twice in the space of one sentence! Now I call that resourceful. And of course he doesn’t limit himself to that. Certainly not. Why bother with precision when you have a nuke in your pocket. No, throw in dominant and institutions while you’re at it, and of course on the other side talk of semi-legitimates who ‘contest’ (always a great hurrah-word), and especially those dear detached outlaws.

Yep, you bet, that’s how the work of ‘contesting’ the ‘authority’ of ‘dominant’ scientific ‘cultures’ is carried out: via vocabulary and innuendo. That’s all it takes. Just say one side has all the advantages – authority, dominance, all that stuff – and the other side has all the other thing – marginalization, opposition, outlawhood – and the job is done. Obviously science is the exact equivalent of slaveowners, feudal masters, priests, landlords, bosses: possessors of arbitrary unjust power which they use to dominate and trample everyone else and engross all the riches. There’s no need to know anything at all about actual science – and Ross doesn’t: notoriously he dedicated this book (Strange Weather) to all the science teachers he never had. Nope; rhetoric is all-powerful. But it’s not authoritative, so that’s all right.