Frank wrote:
> We either have to say that all photography is political or that none
> of it is. (Although I can't figure out how macros of caterpillars or
> family snapshots may be political, but I'm working on it).
To be both serious and boring for a moment, this really has a
lot to do with the pattern-recognition and the make-sense-of-noise
functions that are perhaps the human nervous system's greatest
strengths and weaknesses at the same time. On the one hand, we
can do amazing feats of computation that non-biological computing
devices with far more _raw_horsepower_ than our brains can do,
when looking pattern-recognition tasks (and some interpolation/
extrapolation problems, such as catching a fly ball). On the
other hand, it's _very_ easy to come up with inputs that will
fool a human into seeing "meaning" where there is really only
noise.
At one level this means that anybody sufficiently clever and
motivated can come up with a political interpretation for any
photograph. Or a postmodernist one, or an existential one,
or a religious one, or a sexual one ("Every book's a dirty
book / Though recent ones are bolder / For filth (I'm proud
to say) / Is in the mind of the beholder / When correctly viewed /
Everything is lewd / I could tell you stories about Peter Pan /
Or the Wizard of Oz (there's a dirty old man!)" -- Tom Lehrer).
At another level, people who _aren't_trying_ to be "clever"
can find excuses to _take_offense_ at, well, pretty much
anything. Sometimes they're seeing legitimate message to
object to, sometimes inadvertent message (either the artist's
unconscious bias or merely an accidental combination of symbols
that it's hard _not_ to read meaning into), and sometimes they're
"inventing" signal out of unrelated items.
This is useful when we take the "noise" of a spread of Tarot
cards and let the pattern-recognition engine between our ears
invent a story drawn from subtle subconscious clues (whether
those clues are psychic or rationalist/materialist is not
relevant at this level of analysis) to "interpret" the spread
and come up with possibly-useful predictions. Or a host of
other divinitory _or_meditative_ techniques. This is less
useful when a child interprets a shadow falling across a pile
of clothing as a monster in the middle of the night, or when
religiously insecure people start "seeing Satan under every
rock" because they pattern-match nearly every observation
to signs of sin or evil. Or when noticing/looking for omens
leads to so much superstition that it interferes with daily
life.
This is useful for solving crimes or entertaining ourselves
with mystery stories on television or in books. This is
less useful when it leads people to invent fanciful and
farfetched conspiracy theories.
It's useful for _communicating_ ideas and messages, subtlely
or otherwise, by crafting images that _do_ contain intentional
symbol-sets that the audience is counted on to connect up.
It's essential to poetry. It's how math and science are
discovered -- by noticing the meaningful patterns present in
the data. It's also how scientists get sidetracked for months
or years into blind alleys, by getting distracted by patterns
that turn out not to be meaningful. (In many ways, the modern
philosophy of science is about differentiating between
meaningful patterns and accidental ones reliably.)
The human wetware does many things, but I think one of the
biggest parts of understanding it is as a pattern-recognition
engine. We _want_ to see sense -- especially since we are
in general *so*good*at* finding the important information in
a noisy signal -- and so we will find all sorts of interesting
ways to read meaning into noise even when there's no "signal"
present.
As one final example (really just an excuse to quote a poem
I like -- so there!) consider how a collection of nonsense
words arranged grammatically gives us the comforting impression
that we understand _something_ here even though we don't know
what any of these things are supposed to be:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
(Beyond that there's enough _story_ to see sense in, but that
first verse ... whoah. Still, it _feels_right_, no? How many
of you concocted some sort of mental image of a borogove as
a child? I'm sure I'm not the only one.)
-- Glenn, riding my pygmy
pony, with a pair of
zircon-encrusted tweezers
in my hand.
PS: Heh. Excuses to quote both Carrol and Lehrer (and a
gratuitous bit of Zappa) in one serious post. My day is
complete, even if I didn't work in any Beatles, Dylan,
or Sartre.
