Gretchen Huizinga

Warning: this blog contains graphic academic language, hypothetical religious proselytizing and scatological references. Some material may not be suitable for children or sociology professors.

Review: Anamorphosis is an artistic technique by which the artist presents viewers with an image that can only be properly interpreted from a particular perspective or vantage point. Viewers of anamorphic images must complete an anamorphic action (like standing in the correct position, holding up a special curved mirror, or using a secret decoder ring) in order to the see the image as it is intended to be seen.

It used to be that our main problem with knowledge was a lack of it. For example, we didn’t know, for WAY too long, that people didn’t get cholera from the smell of poop in the air; rather, they got it because they inadvertently drank a poop smoothie. It stinks either way, but that right there is an excellent example of some very useful knowledge.

Now, however, it seems it’s not so much our lack of knowledge but rather, the keeping track of our knowledge that is the problem. Knowledge management and knowledge retrieval are emerging as the primary knowledge issues of this century. Anymore, it’s not that you know stuff, but rather that you know how to go about knowing stuff – and what’s more, that you can find it once you know it – that matters. And to us, the denizens of the 21st century, to whom knowledge has become sacrosanct, it matters. And because it matters, we need to ask ourselves a very important question: Where is all this knowledge coming from?

Most of it comes from what I have referred to previously as The Academic Industrial Complex. This cabal (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) includes research universities, corporate research arms and any number of public or private research institutions. These organizations are in the business of knowledge production and we are their enthusiastic customers. How enthusiastic are we? A new study shows that 86% of Americans will not believe something is true unless they are told that a research study says it is true.

Not really. No study says that. But see how quickly you were inclined to believe me when I said those magic words, “a new study shows?”

But here’s the irony: despite the fact that, 1) we value knowledge highly, 2) we place a great deal of confidence in the researchers who produce it, and, 3) we eagerly embrace the results of research in an effort to improve our lives, we don’t actually believe any of it is true. In all the research papers you’re likely to read (and really, if you’re not required to, you’re not likely to), you will never, ever, read the words, “Well, that’s it. We’ve figured it all out. We can go home now.” Instead, researchers spend the bulk of the concluding sections of their reports making excuses for the limitations of their studies, spelling out the confounding variables, and peppering their reports with phrases like “the data seem to suggest…” and “participants tended to agree…” and “results may indicate…” In the end, researchers always end up oxymoronically concluding that the research is inconclusive. Even the most confident researcher – or the most ideologically committed – wouldn’t dream of suggesting that more research is not needed. After all, mama needs a new pair of shoes…

So, we’ve got all this knowledge produced by big-S Scientists who tell us that none of it is big-T True. Maybe little-t true, possibly big-R Revealing, definitely big-S Suggestive. But not big-T True. And yet. We cling to our knowledge and continue to collect it because we are all acting on the underlying assumption that the world sucks, and if we just had enough knowledge, we could fix the suckiness. As an interesting aside, isn’t it odd that none of our tier one superheroes are scholars? Tony Stark comes close, but he channels his genius too quickly into weapons production and capitalism to fit into tweeds and a cramped office.

No. Scholars are underdogs. Researchers are victims of what I would call Unconsummated Anamorphosis: they have taken up the search for the solutions to life’s biggest problems and the answers to life’s biggest questions by peering into the unfathomable with only one eye open: the physical eye. They have to. From the outset, big-S Science has summarily dismissed the other eye – the metaphysical eye – from the process.

To be sure, big-S Science has a well-articulated set of explanations as to why it must exclude the non-physical. But then, it should admit openly that small-s scientists will forever only be able to uncover and purport small-s truths. In short, they will ever only – by their own admission and definition – be asymptotically approaching conclusive evidence. Hence, the very conveniently inconclusive we-need-more-research conclusion.

At this point, I am compelled to paraphrase Pontius Pilate and ask, “Quid the heck est veritas?” Moreover, if big-T Truth is disqualified from the get-go, why do so many people spend all their lives, and as much of everyone else’s money as they possibly can, ferreting out and publishing their own small contributions to little-t truth? Is there any point in our imagined evolutionary future that we will be able to say, “This is True,” and mean it? Any point when Big Data becomes Enough Data?

It is here that I’d like to suggest an idea that is admittedly politically, scientifically and academically incorrect. But it’s worth discussing if we, particularly those of us in the social sciences, seriously want to crack the code on solving problems and answering questions. The idea is this: when we exclude an entire perspective or point of view from the outset of an investigation, we naturally decrease our chances of meaningful discovery. We should not do that.

What if the anamorphic position (or vantage point) necessary for a more complete understanding of the world went beyond scientific investigation alone? What if, as the writer of Proverbs asserts, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,” was actually true? Knee-jerk alert: I am NOT suggesting AT ALL that the fear of the Lord is the end of knowledge, also. Hence the word “beginning.” Scientific discovery is – and always has been – part of the gig. I would suggest that the writer of that Proverb is suggesting the fear of the Lord is, in academic language, “necessary but not sufficient.” That should offend neither the man of faith nor the man of science. It will probably offend both. And a lot of women, too.

In the Gospel according to Matthew, there is a very interesting – and very puzzling – interchange between Jesus and his disciples:

“The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’ He replied, ‘The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables:

Though seeing, they do not see;
Though hearing, they do not hear or understand.
In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
You will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
They hardly hear with their ears,
And they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
Understand with their hearts
And turn, and I would heal them.’”

You see what Jesus is talking about, don’t you? It’s not physical stuff he’s giving and taking away. It’s metaphysical stuff. Sight. Understanding. Perception. As it turns out, the parable gig was on purpose. Whenever Jesus was speaking to a crowd, he only communicated via parables, and the parable is distinctly anamorphic. The meanings behind the stories can’t be grasped by just anyone; rather, they are only revealed to people who are particularly open to anamorphic vision. He finishes with, “So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.’”

REALLY?? Hidden since the creation of the world?? Well, there goes half your audience, dude. Everyone knows the world wasn’t created…

Ironically, in the historical context in which these words were delivered, the people who didn’t grasp the meaning of these stories were the highly educated folks of the day: the religious leaders who were the gatekeepers and keymasters of knowledge and wisdom. Conversely, peasants and dolts saw things with remarkable clarity. Which just goes to show that you can be too smart for you own good.

In the end, if we care about truth – big-T or little-t – we have to ask, “What conditions would keep us from seeing, understanding and perceiving?” I will phrase the answer to this question like a good researcher would: the answer “appears” to be anamorphic in nature and “seems” as if it would have a huge impact on what kinds of questions we allow ourselves to ask, what kinds of studies we allow ourselves to conduct, what kinds of conclusions we allow ourselves to draw, and, ultimately, what kinds of things we allow ourselves to believe.

There’s no point in heading into that with one eye closed.

I did warn you.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from realtors – and we can learn so much from realtors – it’s the three most important qualities of a property: location, location, location. The same can be said, in a general sense, about research and knowledge production: the answers we find to our questions depend heavily on the location we occupy when go looking. In academic jargon, this is called “positionality.” Positionality (not to be confused with Wessonality, that certain je ne sais quoi that cooking oil gives chicken) is a term used by certain scholars to label the not-so-very complex idea that we all see the world differently, our position primarily and fundamentally being informed by our race, our class and our gender, or raceclassgender, for those that see a common enemy in the white male but are in a hurry to get to the co-op. The core idea of positionality is this: your reality is yours and mine is mine because we see the world from different positions. The core implication of positionality is this: who died and made you king?

Positionality is popular in the social sciences where certain subjective methods in knowledge production are not only tolerated, but are encouraged. If we look sharply enough, we can even detect the stealth presence of positionality in the “hard” sciences. Feminist scholar/activist (a term that steps on its own toes) Michelle Fine admits, “…some of us still smuggle our knowledge of social injustice into a discourse of science that fundamentally contains, and painfully undermines, the powerful politics of activist feminism. As is often the case with moments of social containment, feminists in the social sciences carry weighty evidence for a passionately disruptive transformation of our disciplines. And yet…we also carry domesticating responsibilities to keep this social science appearing dispassionately detached.” I won’t argue with Ms. Fine because first, she is carrying a lot of really heavy luggage, but second, because I appreciate her honesty regarding her dishonesty. I understand, though for different reasons, why she feels the need to be dishonest in order to be allowed into the scientific debate. Any perspective that challenges the current establishment will be met with suspicion, resistance and probably exclusion. That doesn’t mean the perspective is invalid, but it doesn’t it make it valid either. The critical challenge of positionality is the same as the critical challenge of anamorphosis: in order to come as close to “truth” as possible, it is vitally important to be in the correct position.

In her piece, Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance, Rita Raley discusses the anamorphic nature of hypertext (those blue web links that take you from one cyber location to another) and explains, “Anamorphosis is a matter of correcting or adjusting one’s spectatorial position so as to locate the correct perspective.” I would add that we have to double check our position in both space and time, as it may not just be our physical position that blocks the view, but also the fact that we’re, quite literally, “not there yet.” The key point Raley makes though, is that there is such a thing as a correct perspective. In our relativistic, post-modern culture, this is quite a statement. Here, in a discussion about software programming, we readily accept the idea of “correct” perspective and “incorrect” perspective because nobody, not even the most hardcore science-ist, contends that there is no such thing as a software engineer. Once we step into the natural world, or rather out of the natural world and into the supernatural world, we have a lot more trouble coming to terms with this. But at least in this tech-centric world, we will acknowledge that sometimes we simply cannot see something unless we are correctly aligned in space and time. Which leads me to grammar.

As a former English teacher, I admit to having a rather long list of grammatical pet peeves. For example, few people pronounce the word “mischievous” correctly. They say “miss-cheev-ee-us” rather than “miss-chiv-us.” This annoys me, but at least I’m annoyed that it annoys me. I say this to set up another, more literary, pet peeve: the personification of Science, as if it were a monolithic proper noun. “Science has proven…” people say, when science has done no such thing. People prove things. Or don’t. But for the sake of brevity I will be magnanimous. Science operates on the premise that it has nothing in common with Religion, another monolithically personified entity. Science is the path to knowledge, its priests proclaim. Religion is not science (don’t be fooled by the “physics” in metaphysics). Ergo, we cannot ask – moreover, we cannot trust – Religion to participate in the critical modern task of knowledge production or dissemination. In fact, because of its myriad empirical deficiencies, we must work hard to prevent Religion from even trying. This is all part of the philosophical school of logical positivism that clings tightly to the tenet that we cannot know something unless we can observe it. In other words seeing is believing.

Interestingly, this approach absolutely precludes the possibility of non-empirical truth, i.e., that something might be true even if you can’t prove it empirically, and therefore sets up its own empirical deficiencies by disallowing certain “positions” from the debate. But we can always find an audience among the philosophical, including the poet Robert Frost, who, in essence, called BS on the seeing-is-believing trope. He claimed that the best work comes about by, “believing the thing into existence, saying as you go more than you even hoped you were going to be able to say, and coming with surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion.” In other words, believing is seeing.

The premise of Science is that we cannot believe until we see. The paradox of anamorphosis – and of faith – is that we cannot see until we believe. In truth, we must be open to both premise and paradox to achieve the kind of insight – or sight – necessary for truly understanding the world. To be continued…

Anamorphosis is an artistic technique by which the artist presents a somewhat mysterious image that can only be properly interpreted from a particular perspective or vantage point. Viewers of anamorphic images must complete an anamorphic action item (like standing in the right position, holding up a special curved mirror, or using a secret decoder ring…) in order to the see the image as it is intended to be seen. Anamorphosis means “formed again” in Greek.

One night last summer, I went out onto my deck* at dusk. It’s a good deck, high on a hill, facing west toward the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. As it happens, a radically beautiful sunset lured me out, but it was warm and I had bats for company, so I decided to welcome the stars after bidding the sun good night. I stared at a blank indigo dome edged with violent pink brushstrokes, knowing the stars were already there. My eyes flitted back and forth, seeking the first star, and finally it appeared, directly in front of me. Just then, I realized I was experiencing a kind of natural anamorphosis. It was temporal (related to my position in time) rather than spatial (related to my position in space): I was in a perfect position to view the stars but until the time was right, I would not see them. This revelation suddenly made me suspicious that anamorphosis, the notion that something is only recognizable from a particular perspective or position, was far more common, and far more varied, than I might have guessed. Which got me thinking about revelation.

In any contemplation of revelation – for this is the end result of anamophosis – we become, at some point, acutely aware of the limitations of our vision. From our fixed temporal and spatial position in an infinite universe, we can, at best, grope for understanding, seeking diligently for elusive clues that will bring the world into alignment. Though scientists have generated a great deal of knowledge about how the universe works, they have little to offer in the form of plausibly conclusive answers to life’s biggest questions. Conversely, theologians provide little empirical data about how the universe works but have a great deal to say about why it works. One of the most profound (and frustrating) conclusions we are offered is that, as finite beings, we will never know everything. Worse yet, it appears, if you go for such things, that God set it up this way on purpose. The prophet Isaiah quotes God himself, telling us, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Which, for would-be universal code-crackers, is somewhat depressing. But hold on. A few hundred years later, the apostle Paul promises anamorphic resolution after all, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” For now, he implies, we have to be satisfied with a sort of catoptric anamorphosis (using a special mirror to see an image). At some future point, however, everything will become clear.

It is an exciting promise, except when we remember that the anamorphic action item is death.

* Yeah. That’s the view from my deck.