E X P OS ITI O N Issue 1, Michaelmas 2009
BRITAIN’S MUSE the cult of Kate Moss
SEXUAL AGENDA
the disintegration of gender
SNAPSHOT
of peace in the Middle East
DYSTOPIAN HOLLYWOOD the violence within us all
EXPOSITION EDITORS Emma Mockford Helena See
If you are interested in contributing to or advertising with Exposition, or subscribing independently of The Oxford Student, email: editor@expositionmagazine.com
Welcome to the first issue of Exposition. Our aim is to combine entertaining journalism with serious research, style with substance, icing with cake. Our focus – politics, society, and the arts – covers a broad range of disciplines, from Gender and Art History to Psychology and International Relations. Taking current graduate research as our starting point, we have created features that address modern issues and preoccupations: fashion, sexuality, violence, conflict, and celebrity, through a variety of media, including original photography and artwork. Outside of our own subjects, we rarely hear about the research that goes on in the wider University. And yet Oxford is home to several major think-tanks, including the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and the Centre for SocioLegal Studies, and is the birthplace of a dazzling list of ground-breaking scientific discoveries. The very real social application of academia, particularly the arts and humanities, is often overlooked. In this issue, we examine in particular the endemic nature of prejudice (Licence to Hate, page 25), its manifestation across the gender divide (As Nature Made Us, page 22), and its subconscious usage in war and conflict (A Cinema of Envy, page 12). In our photo essay, (Without Borders, page 14), tentative solutions to such divisions are suggested.
Sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland and Shell
Emma Mockford and Helena See
FINANCE DIRECTOR Tom Rowley GRAPHICS CONSULTANT Rich Hardiman PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Jonathan McQuitty SUB EDITORS Louis Barclay Emily Goodacre CONTRIBUTORS Ana Finel Honigman DPhil, Art History Daniel Cojacuro DPhil, English Literature Jonny McQuitty BA, Oriental Studies Milos Martinov MPhil, International Relations Keon West DPhil, Experimental Psychology Sebastian Sequoiah-Graystone DPhil, Philosophy
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CONTENTS
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ART HISTORY She’s the face of British fashion and one of the most enduring icons of our age. How do we explain the cult of Kate Moss?
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LITERATURE
14
PHOTO ESSAY
22
GENDER
26
PSYCHOLOGY
29
From Batman to Public Enemies, the violence that lies at the heart of human relationships foretells the coming of a conflict of all against all
Beyond the barricades, we meet the doctors defying generations of war to treat children from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Are we born straight, do we achieve straightness, or is straightness thrust upon us? Society controls the way we think about sex, sexuality and gender
Even the most liberal of societies is ridden with prejudice and hidden privilege, and ours is no exception. We uncover some unsavoury truths
PHILOSOPHY Once the undisputed master of the world, man now vies with machines for sophistication. What can artificial intelligence tell us about our minds?
PHOTOGRAPH | A mother and child from Gaza wait at the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon, Tel Aviv to see Dr Tamir, an Israeli cardiologist. By Jonny McQuitty
THIS PAGE | Stella Vine, Holy water cannot help you now, Acrylic on canvas, 2005 (Bloomsbury studio) OPPOSITE | Amie Dickie, Ooh Kate, Ink on magazine paper, courtesy of Peres projects, Berlin, Los Angeles and Diana Stigter, Amsterdam and Artist
ART HISTORY She’s the muse of artists and the object of mass obsession. What is it about Kate Moss that makes her so magnetic?
Is this the face of our times?
K
ate Moss has inspired more artists’ work than any other non-religious or royal female subject in history. Depictions of the 35 year old English model, or references to her have found their way into works of all mediums and styles by artists at all levels of mastery and recognition. She occupies a unique space in the fashion and art world: some artists seek to depict her distinctive personal beauty while others allude to her persona or employ her as a token for beauty as an ideal. And yet the original works created so far have been widely criticised for their failure to capture the qualities of Moss so captivating in photographs. Fans and art-students alike have lovingly rendered Moss’s distinct face on an amateur level. But she has also been the subject of works by artists at the zenith of the contemporary art world – Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marc Quinn, Lucian Freud, Stella Vine, Rita Ackermann, Banksy and Katherine Bernhardt to name but a few. Additionally, images of Kate Moss created in fashion editorials and photographs by Corinne Day, Ryan Ginley, Jurgen Teller and Terry
Richardson have achieved high-art status at fairs, galleries and museum exhibitions. November will see the start of an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs devoted to her 19 years in the public eye, running through until April 2010. Why is it that Moss has received such widespread attention within the fashion and art communities, not to mention general mass audiences? The focus of the two differs: because of its preoccupation with novelty and distinctiveness, the fashion community gravitates towards unconventional beauty, whereas wider audiences look to polished and familiar figures to fuel their fantasies rather than models with distinctly raw appearances. Moss’s diminutive height, unglamorous initial persona and feral sex appeal made her ascent to the upper echelons of fashion a significant feat, and her further entry into mainstream pop culture has been extraordinary. On the other hand, her transformation into an art icon seems more of a natural progression, since the appreciations by artists of individual complex beauty are often sharper than in >>
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mainstream commercial culture. From an intellectual perspective the particulars that distinguish Moss from other Great Beauties provide the clues to her relevance for artists. More compelling than Moss herself or her appearance has been her embodiment of the ethos of her times and her evocation and projection of a sense of empathy with her admirers. Moss found her place in the public imagination in the 1990s; a period academically characterised by post-modern theories of relativism, simulacrum and identity discourse. Scepticism toward the media and media manipulations became a strong component of academia and other subcultures, manifested itself in self-consciously ‘meta’ mainstream imagery. The nineties was an era consumed with a quest for authenticity but leavened with scepticism. And scepticism combined with a desire to appear knowledgeable underscored a culture in which irony and cynicism were prevailing popular, intellectual and creative impulses. >>
Moss’s raw yet uncontestable beauty offered a visual equivalent to the grunge rock movement’s sound and ethos
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Moss was born in Croydon and discovered at age fourteen. She was photographed by the realist fashion photographer Corinne Day for a black and white unposed spread entitled The Third Summer of Love that appeared in the British avant-garde magazine, The Face. In contrast to the globally recognised models and the prevailing style of that period, Moss’s body was waifish, her teeth were snagged, her skin was freckled and her attitude was gawky and irreverent. In sum, she emanated authenticity. For a time obsessed with deconstructing and understanding the historical and ongoing relationships between identity and privilege, Moss’s raw yet uncontestable beauty offered a visual equivalent to the grunge rock movement’s sound and ethos, and stood out as a comparable manifestation of rebelliousness against polished, problematic ideals and standards.
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One of the first artists to incorporate images of Moss into her oeuvre was Karen Kilimnik, who has since earned long-lasting significance within contemporary art. Kilimnik’s doodle-like drawings of silph-like models Twiggy, Kate Moss, Amber Valetta and Cecelia Chancellor, which she copied from fashion editorials and ads in the 1990s, displayed many of the qualities ascribed to the girls themselves. The endearingly flawed pencil drawings and paintings possessed a rough adolescent aspect that conveyed yearning, solipsism and naked desires. And the prevailing subject matter of her work was plainly a tender sense of admiration and association with the models she drew. Kilimnik’s art muddied the boundaries between the art of outsider fans and high art by accepted professional artists; her work employed post-modern strategies of pastiche and provoked discussion of gender, media and artists’ identity, yet also expressed her uncritical fascination with the figures she depicted. As a vivid contrast, an image that has suffered strong criticism for its lack of resemblance to Moss is the one that intentionally defies the idealised fantasy image created of her in later glossy editorial and advertising work. Naked Portrait 2002 was painted by Lucien Freud in his studio and presents a nude, pregnant Kate Moss lounging on a rough single bed. Her features are unrecognisably heavy and her body appears bloated and slovenly rather than pregnant. Moss’s flesh is rendered thick and blotchy from Freud’s signature application of chunky swatches of paint slathered on the canvas with a palette knife. The painting extends further than the many candid and nonidealised images of Moss, to the realm of visual distortion. Though antithetical in style, Freud’s realist portrait of Moss evokes an emotional response that echoes William De Kooning’s 1954 abstract portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which deployed aggressive slaps and heavy swipes of paint to represent her as a misshaped figure recognizable only through the signifiers of blond hair, red lips and giant breasts. Critic, David Cohen, has asserted the discordance of Freud’s painting: “It seems incongruous for Kate Moss to end up in a Freud painting: his aesthetic, so redolent of the miserabilist, earnest, ex-
the controversial artist compared Moss to the Mona Lisa because of her enigmatic qualities: “Kate doesn’t speak.” Vine’s works, exhibited during Moss’s media shaming over her cocaine use, capture a brassy, vibrant strength that reflects Vine’s faith in Moss’s personal fortitude, perhaps as a projection of her own wished-for self. Other artists have engaged Moss’s image as a fashion icon whose unconventional beauty exemplifies the industry’s paradoxical interest in jolie-laides rather than obvious prettiness. Dutch artist, Amie Dicke, whose interventions into fashion images have produced seductive and disarming collage works in recent years, often employs images of Moss. For a recent mixed-media work, Dicke drove silver nails through a French Vogue magazine cover featuring Moss in a black and white image, covering Moss’s face and body and hammering the two longest extended nails through her palms. Although her features are completely obscured, Moss’s name is still seen written in gold letter across her raised knees. While violent, the image that emerges is beautiful and redolent of Moss’s own sexually daring style aesthetic. At its core, Moss’s image appeals to audiences because of her own refusal to refute their associations. She grants few interviews and remains sphinx-like when she does speak. The paradoxical nature of her beauty, simultaneously accessible and mysterious, allows artists to approach but never quite capture the essence of her allure, while also giving them scope to empathise with her through their work. “Kate’s an artist too, it’s all there in her eyes,” says Vine. “She gives all us fucked-up loners a sparkle in our day.” istentialist post-war period in which he came artistically of age, seems a far cry from the slick, trashy, ephemeral pop culture epitomized by the cult of celebrity models.” Cohen’s commentary betrays a lack of understanding of Moss’s unique role within the fashion industry as a broad cultural icon embodying the antithesis of typical glossy fashion culture. In the context of the fashion industry, Moss’s allure originates with the very ability to embody the qualities Cohen ascribes to Freud. And yet Cohen’s appreciation of the inherent tension in the painting is indicative of Freud’s attempt to lower Moss to the level of common flesh, without acknowledging that Moss’s significance as a subject already resides in her commonness. As Alex Katz asserted in the 2003 W magazine issue devoted to artists paying homage to Moss, and which contained Katz’s own minimalist portrait of the model, “She’s completely ordinary. That’s what makes her extraordinary.” At first glance, Freud’s painting appears to fit within the genre of realism, yet it actually functions more as a cartoon of Moss, exaggerating her authentic, relaxed, earthy qualities which captivate her audience and propel her celebrity status, but stops short of offering a keener insight into her as a person or a demonstration of the power of her persona. Stella Vine, another artist who achieved aclaim after creating works paying homage to Moss, is direct about her admiration of the celebrity. In an interview conducted for my doctoral research, IMAGES | Clockwise from top left: Stella Vine, Kate Unfinished, acrylic on canvas, 2005 (Bloomsbury Studio); William de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe, 1954; Irving Penn, Untitled, 1996; Lucien Freud, Naked Portrait 2002, 2002
Ana Finel Honigman is a Berlin-based critic, and a PhD candidate in History of Art at LMH. Ms Finel Honigman is a regular contributor for on-line and print publications including, Art in America, Grazia, Harper’s Bazaar UK, Art Journal, The Guardian’s Art and Architecture blog and The New York Times’ style section
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A cinema
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In the closing moments of the first of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Batman Begins, Lieutenant Gordon (played by Gary Oldman) asks of dark hero Batman (Christian Bale), “What about escalation? We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar. They buy armour piercing rounds. And you’re wearing a mask, jumping off rooftops. Now take this guy: armed robbery, double homicide, got a taste for the theatrical like you – leaves a calling card.” What we witness here is an allusion to imitation as the driving force in the escalation of the conflict at the heart of Nolan’s films: the “good guys”, Batman and the police, pitted against the “bad guys”, the local mob and the Joker, so introduced in the extract above. This short exchange is the beginning of a deconstruction of the otherwise presumed differences between the “good” or worthy violence employed by Batman on the one hand and the “bad” violence of the films’ villains on the other. Here we are party to the growing realisation that the intensification of violence on both sides is dependent upon a mirroring process: each looking to the other for the next step up. French literary critic and anthropologist, René Girard, has documented this process of conflictive imitation in his analysis of the great writers of the Western literary tradition, including Shakespeare, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky. His Theatre of Envy, first published in 1991, offers a reinterpretation of Shakespearian literature, premised around Girard’s own novel proposition that human desire for objects is neither intrinsic nor autonomous, but rather is shaped by others’ desire: we want because someone else also wants. Girard pio-
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neered a transformation in social anthropology, shifting attitudes and reactions towards imitation from traditional conceptions as a low-level, even childish form of behaviour to a rare ability, “fundamentally linked to characteristically human forms of intelligence.” In his analysis of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Girard writes: “Valentine and Proteus can be friends only by desiring alike and, if they do, they are enemies”, essentially a radicalisation of the imitative escalation found in Nolan’s films. Girard suggests that not only do enemies often grow to become alike but that friendship and enmity stem from the same source, so much so that enemies have often been the best of friends. For many this theory sits uncomfortably: it challenges our intuitive conception of conflict as arising because of fundamental differences between the parties involved. Rather, conflictive imitation erases differences as enemies begin to resemble one another. Take cold war politics as an example. The differences between East and West were defended as irreducible, but the world witnessed a similar imitative escalation, the never-ending armament of East and West rendering the conflict parties liable to states of so-called mutually asserted destruction (MAD), by which both East and West began to resemble each other. Thematic explorations of violence and human desire have always been subject matter ripe for dramatic interpretation. Of late Hollywood’s preoccupation with this kind of dark material seems to have grown, so much so that we find ourselves able to talk of a ‘Cinema of Envy’, comparable to Girard’s ‘Theatre of Envy’. A recent example is Michael Mann’s film, Pub-
LITERATURE Frequently criticised values, Hollywood is bucking the tr
IMAGE | Christian Bale a
a of envy
d for its trite morality and simplistic rend with a darker view of humanity
as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
lic Enemies, in which the state authorities and police force are depicted as yet further participants in gang land turf wars in their imitation of criminal methods, as opposed to enforcers of law and order. What prompts this imitation? At the core of the rivalry and the disappearance of differences in conflictive imitation is the lack of, and search for, identity. The aim of the rivals is to possess the other’s being, as supposedly superior to one’s own. Girard goes so far as to offer an interpretation of the Tenth Commandment – “Thou shalt not covet any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s” (Exodus 20.17) – as a protection against the emergence of this type of rivalry. We have established that desire is imitative, and it is grounded in a lack of identity that can lead to conflict, and to the effacement of differences through imitation in that conflict. But Lieutenant Gordon’s initial question, “What about escalation?” has yet to be answered. According to Girard, the uninhibited process of conflictive imitation spreads contagiously on a societal level until it has reached dimensions that can lead a society to the brink of chaos. We see instances of this all around us: gang rivalry, civil war, the Cold War. Essentially these conflicts are a struggle of all against all. So how is this struggle to be resolved? Why does chaos not lead to collapse? Taking Girard’s thesis to its end, the resolution of such conflict can only occur by the appearance and victimisation of a scapegoat, upon whom all the violent potentials can be vented without fear of reprisal. The choice of this victim is an arbitrary one, guided by the sole criterion of difference. For as the conflicting parties continuously grow to resemble
one another, someone with even the slightest of differences makes a worthy target. Examples abound: in the Cold War, the McCarthy era typified this kind of scapegoating. Common also is the targeting of ethnic minorities by a majority trying to conceal its own internal dissensions. According to Girard, this process of scapegoating violence is the most basic foundation of all cultures and social populations. The success of the process rests on the absolute conviction of the guilt of the victim and the subsequent camouflage of the persecuting crowd’s violence: the proverbial crowd is convinced that the crisis was precipitated by the scapegoat, and can thus rest sound under the illusion that causation is far removed from their own mimetic conflict. In short, this process only functions as long as it remains hidden from its participants. How is it then that we are even able to identify, let alone discuss, this process at all? Girard claims that the Crucifixion of Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, reveals, for the first time in history, the scapegoating mechanism: the Gospels insist on Christ’s innocence; Christ as victim is not demonised. The role of the persecuting mob that tries to save its people through the expulsion of one victim is made manifest in the Jewish High Priest’s suggestion to let one man die to save all. Through the revelation of Christ’s innocence, all the victims in history past and future are rehabilitated. The Gospels reveal our persecution to us, and thereby rob us of the possibility of resolution via scapegoating violence. We can still persecute, but the death of the victim has no longer the restorative effect it had when we believed in its absolute guilt. >>
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PHOTOGRAPH | A conflict of all against all: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945
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>> Thus the paradox of modern society is created. On the one hand ours is the first society in history that attempts to give a voice to victims, and yet we still harbour the violent potential that arises from conflictive mimesis. If we can no longer vent this potential on an easy scapegoat the question of what happens to our violent urges becomes yet more pressing. And so we return for the final time to Lieutenant Gordon’s question of escalation. The Joker’s role within The Dark Knight is that of the Satanic instigator of the scapegoat mechanism. Throughout the film he is responsible for the creation of situations in which people must choose to commit violence themselves and thereby survive, or die. When the Joker threatens to blow up a hospital, the only possible prevention is to kill Colman Reese, the lawyer who intends to reveal Batman’s identity. Towards the end of the film, when panic prompts mass evacuation of Gotham City, the Joker places bombs on two ferry ships, one transporting convicted criminals, the other “innocent” civilians. Each ferry receives the detonators for the other boat. The Joker threatens to detonate both bombs, unless one ship chooses to
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blow up the other. As the structural innocence of the convicts is revealed (by their choice not to detonate the bomb on board the civilian ship), the escalation hinted at in Batman Begins can no longer be resolved through the expulsion of a scapegoat: instead we witness an impending social collapse, as the Girardian interpretation of Christ’s words, “If Satan cast out Satan, his Kingdom cannot stand” (Matthew 12:26) points to. That is to say that the Joker’s threat of blowing up both ships can be read as signifying the explosive situation of all unresolved conflicts of imitation that can lead to a struggle of all against all and thus to the collapse of society. Being robbed of the illusion of the guilt of the scapegoat, the restorative function of the scapegoat mechanism is no longer available to us. To appropriate the Biblical phrase: violence can no longer cast out violence. The Joker even offers to become the scapegoat himself. Batman’s refusal to kill the villain of the piece is an illustration of the final recognition that mimetic escalation is merely a proliferation of the satanic principle of violent expulsion. Rather we witness a transformation
in Batman, as he becomes a passive character, willing to suffer violence rather than perpetrate it. And so it is the hero himself who becomes the scapegoat of the city. Gotham unites against him, holding him responsible for the crisis. While then to the inhabitants of Gotham peace is restored through the illusion of Batman’s guilt, the audience is robbed of their scapegoating illusions and is presented with the following choice: a spread of violence without end, or radical non-violence in imitation of Batman and Christ, even if this means death. For violence, as The Dark Knight suggests, has lost its restorative function. Thus we are called to forfeit our conflictive imitation and adopt the only alternative to violence without end in our time: unconditional forgiveness. Who knew Hollywood could be so insightful? Daniel Cojocaru is a DPhil candidate in English Literature at St Peter’s College. His thesis paper is entitled ‘The Sacrifical Crisis in Dystopian Fiction’
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WITHOUT BORDERS PHOTO ESSAY Bringing children from conflict-ridden countries including Uganda, Gaza and Iraq to Tel Aviv for life-saving cardiac treatment, the cooperation of Palestinian and Israeli doctors represents a microcosm of the peace process
PHOTOGRAPH | Two mothers from Gaza wait with their babies for an initial consultation with Dr Tamir at the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon. One infant will later be admitted for urgent surgery to correct a heart condition.
Founded on the site of the first children’s hospital in Jerusalem, the charity Shevet Achim (Hebrew for Brothers Living Together), has worked since 1994 to make life-saving cardiac care available to children from countries lacking the requisite medical facilities. A Christian organisation, the charity’s work is particularly striking because of its partnership with another, this time Jewish, charity, Save a Child’s Heart (SACH). SACH was conceived by the late Dr Ami Cohen, Head of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery at the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon, to the south of Tel Aviv. Initially SACH’s primary focus was the treatment of patients from Ethiopia. In the early nineties it enjoyed a short lived partnership with the Palestinian Authority, rapidly ended by the PA in a bid to encourage self-sufficiency. Since then, it has treated children from all over the world. Its patients’ list numbers over 2100 children, all treated free of charge. Despite the current closure of border crossings into Gaza, there is a regular traffic in patients moving through the Erez checkpoint to receive specialised or emergency medical care. Shevet operates closely with SACH to run a dedicated clinic for Palestinian children each week. In the wake of the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, Shevet Achim began a new program to expand its work to Iraqi children. This has centred on Kurdistan, the northernmost province of Iraq, but has also included predominantly Arab areas. Preliminary screening to select the most urgent and viable patients takes place in Jordan; over 30 children are typically seen by Dr Tamir, the current head of SACH, and his staff at each session in Amman. Iraqi families spend the entire duration of their child’s treatment in Israel as it is impracticable to return between diagnosis and treatment. They live with the staff of Shevet Achim at the children’s hospital which neighbours the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Mea Shearim. Up to five families will live there at any one time between their frequent trips to the Wolfson for further treatment. The SACH medical staff that perform the procedures at the Wolfson make their skills available on a pro bono basis, while the hospital itself subsidises and limits the associated costs of treatment, including facilities, equipment and medication. SACH and Shevet Achim jointly provide the remaining necessary finances. Shevet Achim also provides much of the logistical support that allows the clinic to run on a regular basis. The permits granted to patients coming into Israel from Gaza are generally only valid for travel to and from the Wolfson, and any treatment there. Staff from Shevet Achim are therefore called upon to transport Gazan patients back to the Erez crossing as soon as >>
ABOVE | Justin Strong, an American volunteer, lifts a chronically ill baby from Gaza into a van at the Erez checkpoint. While there are often delays in crossing the border, priority medical cases are invariably accorded entry. LEFT | A Kurdish boy in recovery after a diagnostic catheterization procedure lasting an hour. From initial referral in Kurdistan to the end of treatment in Israel typically takes up to three to four months. This boy will later return to the hospital for surgical intervention. In the meantime he will continue to recover at the Shevet Achim house in Jerusalem. RIGHT | Mohammed, a child from Gaza, attends the Wolfson Medical Centre for a check up. Now a lively toddler, Mohammed was previously a chronically underweight and unresponsive child. He has now attained a normal weight, and will be discharged later today for his return to Gaza.
>> treatment finishes. The process of collecting and returning patients can be lengthy. While the actual crossing of the Gazan border at the sleek and modern terminal at Erez is relatively straightforward, delays are commonp’lace and the guards at the crossing are seldom forthcoming with information, beyond the ubiquitous and abrupt refrain of bitachon (‘security’). This is perhaps unsurprising given the complexity and sensitivity of the political situation. Regular prisoner exchanges take place here, while the entry and exit of any senior diplomat entails a lengthy closure of the checkpoint. Sporadic mortar and rocket fire before the 2009 ceasefire also led to regular closures. Following the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, there was a significant amount of disruption to SACH and Shevet Achim activities – a quarter of patients were prevented from travelling due to the problematic bureaucracy of the new government. That said, emergency cases have always been permitted to pass through the border. The same is not true of medical supplies. While the embargo does permit the transfer of equipment, returning patients are regularly forced to change to less sophisticated medication regimes, heightening the need for a degree of adaptability on the part of the charities’ doctors. As well as patients, medical staff from Gaza travel to the Wolfson regularly. The process also works in reverse; until recently an Israeli doctor regularly visited Gaza to assist Dr Fayez, head of the cardiology department at the Al Nasser Pediatric Hospital in Gaza City. Co-operation between medical staff is a key part of SACH’s work. Dr Tamir is frank about the limitations of the charities’ work: “Globally, ten, maybe fifteen percent of children requiring cardiac care receive it. We are a small group – one surgeon, and until 2004 only one cardiologist. We have a ten bed intensive care unit – we cannot treat every patient in Gaza.” Questions are often raised concerning the wider repercussions of the work of these two charities on the peace process. What is clear is that staff from both the Occupied Territories and Israel are committed on an individual level to peace. “If an Israeli were to be brought to my hospital in a critical condition,” says Dr Fayez, “and required a blood transfusion to stay alive, I would of course donate my own blood to save him. Concern for fellow humanity comes before politics.” Dr Tamir shares similar views: “Of course if a family sees soldiers come into their house in the middle of the night and take their >>
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ABOVE | Ikram, a child from Kurdistan leaves the Pediatric unit with his father (left) and Donna Petrel (right), the family care co-ordinator for Shevet Achim to undergo a catheterization procedure. LEFT | Several months ago, Harvey, this baby from Uganda was brought into the country for emergency cardiac surgery shortly after birth. Within 72 hours of diagnosis, he was in Holon receiving treatment. Having undergone serious surgery unavailable in Uganda, he has now fully recovered and is due to return to Uganda shortly. FAR LEFT | Doctors Fayez (left) and Tamir (right) discuss the case of a Gazan patient. Dr Fayez travels from Gaza each week to participate in the weekly surgery for Palestinian patients. He has co-operated closely with his Israeli colleague Dr Tamir for over a decade to provide pediatric cardiac care to these patients.
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>> father or their brother, then they will bear some animosity towards Israelis. The work we do though, reduces the hate. But our goal when we started was not to bring peace. We did it because we are professionals, and we believe as professionals that we should not look only at our own people, but to children from all over the world. We will go out of our way to treat them. “Any ideology of discrimination is something that I will oppose as much as I can. We have to be sincere in what we do. Medicine is not just a technical skill. The fact that I know how to catheterise does not give me much satisfaction, if behind it there is no philosophy of action; doctors exist to help people who suffer, and it shouldn’t matter what country they are RIGHT | The father of Ikram waits while his son is in surgery. Waiting can be an isolating experience: only one family member is able to accompany any child due to logistical and financial constraints. Exacerbated by the language barrier and cultural dislocation, Shevet Achim’s volunteers provide support for the families affected. BELOW | Ikram and his father sleep following a successful procedure. Ikram will undergo further surgery in the coming weeks to correct his condition, tetrology of the fallot, that obstructs blood flow from the right side of the heart. Jonny McQuitty is an undergraduate student at Worcester College reading Oriental Studies. He has recently spent time working at Ha’aretz Daily Newspaper in Tel Aviv, Israel
As Nature
Consider money. The little multicoloured slips of paper, status as money is the result of a collective consensus ab isms, and sexual desires are real, the meanings that we created by humans and depend on s
M
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ale is to female, as masculine is to feminine, as penis is to vagina. These few words embody the predominant view of sex, gender, and sexuality in the 20th Century, and a view that very much persists into the present day. We are still largely governed by the presumption that male and female are the only two sexes. Masculinity is viewed as the natural manifestation of maleness, while femininity is considered to be the biological outgrowth of femaleness. And heterosexual sex – defined as the union of penis and vagina – is perceived as the paradigmatic social norm. The very existence of people who do not fit this supposedly natural and divinely ordained heterosexist model (such as, feminine males, masculine females, people who want to change their sex, intersexuals and homosexuals) suggests that this model needs replacing. Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s now famous assertion, that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” feminists, queer theorists, historians and sociologists posed the following puzzles: ‘if masculinity for men, femininity for women, and heterosexuality are indeed natural and biologically pre-determined, then how is it possible that feminine men, masculine
women, and homosexuals even exist? If sex is given at birth, then what do we make of the experience of transsexuals, who’s mental and physical sexes do not match? And how do we explain the diversity of masculinities and femininities across time and space?’ Contrary to the heterosexist model, which is dependent upon assertions of biological given-ness, this academic movement has developed various social constructionist theories, which posit that sex, gender and sexuality are created by human beings and depend upon collective agreement for their existence. Sex The argument about the social construction of sex is perhaps the most difficult to make. It is assumed that the two-sex model requires no explanation or justification; that it simply ‘is’. However, the existence of the intersexed, or people with a mixture of female and male sex organs, suggests otherwise. In reality, one in approximately 2000 infants is born with an anatomy that refuses to conform to our preconceptions of male and female. Knowledge of this phenomenon may come as a surprise to most because, until very recently, it was standard practice for doctors, in Fausto-Sterling’s
words, “to catch intersexuals at birth.” Confronted with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, doctors rushed to operate on the infant in order to surgically craft ‘appropriate’ male and female reproductive organs. Intersexuals were, thus, literally erased from existence in order to enforce the two-sex system. Those intersexuals who escaped the surgeon’s knife faced an altogether different kind of erasure: social exclusion and discrimination. The story of the Spanish hurdler, Maria Patino, whose mixed sex characteristics were revealed by ‘femininity tests’ mandated by the International Olympic Committee, is emblematic. While Patino had only ever known herself to be a woman, the tests showed that she had Y-chromosomes and testicles inside her labia, and this resulted in swift disqualification from competition at the 1988 Olympics, abandonment by her boyfriend, and the revocation of all her previous awards. “I was erased from the map, as if I had never existed,” she recalls. And while Patino did manage to return to competition, regaining her status as an athlete was an uphill struggle of titanic proportions, both financially and emotionally. The recent Caster Semenya case reveals both how much and how little has changed. Transsexuality poses another challenge to the central te-
Made Us
, though real, have no inherent meaning to them; their bout their signification. Similarly, while bodies, mannergive to them, the way in which we categorise them, are social agreement for their existence nets of the heterosexist model: it questions the assertion that sex is given from birth and remains constant throughout life. Trans activist and gender theorist, Julia Serano, has described transsexuality as the state of experiencing ‘subconscious sex’ (or the sex one profoundly feels oneself to be) as fundamentally at odds with birth sex. Many trans people will take steps to change their physical bodies later in life in order to remedy this disjunction. On the whole, the basic flaw that critics have identified in the heterosexist model is oversimplification: it ignores the actual variety and complexity of sexed bodies and experiences. Clifford Geertz: “people who adhere to the heterosexist model tend to regard femaleness and maleness as exhausting the natural categories in which persons can conceivably come: what falls between is a darkness, an offence against reason.” Resistance to this idea has led to calls for a fundamental transformation of our two-sex system. Fausto-Sterling has argued that we should add a further three sexes (herms, merms and ferms) to our classification scheme, in order to come closer to capturing the diversity of human bodies and lived experiences. Indeed, the presence of ‘Third Sexes’ in some non-Western societies
does suggest that a two-sex classification is not inevitable and may be open to transformation. For instance, Serena Nanda has argued that the hijras of India represent “an institutionalized third gender role, [they are] neither male nor female.” This idea is controversial: some have claimed that since hijras are born male (or intersexual), but adopt feminine behaviors, names, mannerisms and styles of dress, they are simply trans women living in an Indian cultural context. But there is also evidence to suggest that some hijras do identify themselves with the ‘third sex’ category. Take the example of Mona Ahmed, a hijra interviewed by prominent photographer Dayanita Singh. When Singh asked her about whether she would like to have a sex change operation, Ahmed replied negatively and explained: “You really do not understand. I am the third sex. Not a man trying to be a woman. It is your society’s problem that you only recognize two sexes.” Gender Most ideas about gender are founded on the social meanings ascribed to biologically sexed bodies. Society presumes to know what nature intended for our sexed bodies and uses that as foundational information for the creation
Credits | Photography: Sarah Mayne; Make up: Claire Durbin, Delamar Academy (www.clairedurbin.com); Model: Dominic Milner
of a gender system – feminine roles follow naturally from femaleness and masculine roles are the biological consequence of maleness. The vast transformations in gender norms across the centuries – women’s suffrage, education, and participation in sport, to name just a few – clearly challenge this model, and provide easy empirical examples in favour of social constructionism. But gender as a social construction has also been conceived of in a deeper, more personal sense. Philosopher, Judith Butler, has pointed out how, in Western culture, it is common to assume that all individuals’ gender ‘doings’ (mannerisms, clothes, social roles) are reflective of some inner, bio-psychological male or female essence. But what if this assumption of an essential self, driving behavior, was flawed? What if gender primarily consisted of acts, which are not necessarily tied to any inner essence, acts that are performed under the pressure of social regulation? In her work, Butler questions the very basic assumption that an essential self necessarily lurks underneath our skins, controlling and dictating our gendered behavior. Empirical investigations of this thought-experiment have found that gender often function as a ‘social >>
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>> achievement,’ rather than as the expression of an internal essence. While gendered behaviors often become so routinized and fixed that they appear to reflect such an essence, in fact they are learned and subject to social approval or disapproval. Examples abound: women who do not shave their legs or armpits, men who color-code their notes or speak in a high-pitched tone, women who are loud and outspoken, men who choose to wear makeup and so on. Feminine men and trans women are the most frequent sufferers of this form of disapproval. In her book, Whipping Girl, Julia Serano argues that the high levels of violence meted out to men who express femininity and men who want to become women is the result of ‘traditional sexism,’ or Western society’s devaluation of everything that is female or feminine. Sexuality
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Sexuality may appear to pose the most obvious challenge to the heterosexist model; most people have at least a passing familiarity with the idea that sexuality can be fluid and changeable. Nonetheless, studies purporting to have discovered the biological pre-ordination and essentially fixed nature of sexuality still abound. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have recently argued that gay men’s brains resemble those of straight women. The two halves of heterosexual women’s and homosexual men’s brains are fairly equal in size, while for heterosexual men the right hemisphere is slightly larger. Based on this influential biological framework, sexual orientation would be determined while a child is still in the womb. But failure to account for diversity once again poses a challenge to this pre-ordained view. Lacking, for instance, is an explanation of the prevalence of ‘situational’ homosexuality in single-sex settings such as prisons, British boarding schools, and armies. In those cases, sexuality appears to be strongly influenced by the institutional setting, not any biological pre-determination. Philosopher Michel Foucault has also pointed out that ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ identities are inventions of late 19th Century medical discourse. Previously, sexuality was not viewed as a state of being (as something one was) but simply as something that one did. If a man was a ‘sodomite,’ that simply meant that he committed sex acts that were considered ‘immoral,’ not that one was incorrigibly a sexual ‘deviant’ by constitution and essential identity. Thus, the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ (as homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual) has a fairly short history. And while people have certainly existed who had an exclusive or predominant attraction to one or both genders, the notion that sexualities must necessarily be classified on that basis has not always been dominant. In certain segments of Ancient Greek society, sexuality was defined more by social class status than gender. For upper caste Athenian men, in particular, the gender of their partners did not matter so much. Rather, it was important that the ‘active’ partner (the one who penetrated) was in a higher social position than the ‘passive’ partner. So, older men could penetrate younger males, women, and slaves, but they could not have sex with each other. Historicization, thus, leads us to the conclusion that alternative conceptualizations of sexuality must be at least theoretically possible. There is already a proliferation of diverse sexual communi-
EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2009
Photo | Androgenous fashion has been a mainstay of the industry since the 1930s
ties on the internet and in some metropolitan areas (S & M-ers, foot and armpit fetishists, etc), which suggests that it might be possible to have socially recognized classifications of sexuality, not focused on gender. Currently, however, limitations persist: for better or worse, we are only socially intelligible if we define ourselves as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. As Society Made Us? The key advantage of the social constructionist paradigm is that it can focus our attention on the fact that phenomena widely considered natural or biologically given, may actually be the historical products of collective human agency or, in the words of West & Zimmerman, the result of ‘social doings of some sort.’ In ideological terms, this way of looking at the world can be highly useful. Feminists, queer activists and intersexuals have defined the 20th Century gender and sexual order as fundamentally unjust, and social constructionist theory clearly suggests that this order can be changed: since humans created it, they can also undo it. Constructionism shows that a world in which intersexual infants are not operated on at birth, where trans people are valued and respected, and in which a plurality of different sexualities co-exist peacefully, is possible. It is this progressive potential at the core of social constructionist theory, which has attracted so many people, and will surely only attract more.
Milos Martinov studied at Pembroke College and has an MPhil in International Relations. His thesis topic was the role of social constructivist theory in the discipline of International Relations. You can find more of his writing on gender and sexuality at www.belowthebelt.org
PHOTOGRAPHS | Scenes from the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas. Elizabeth Eckford, pictured, was one of the nine black students to enrol on May 17th 1954
PSYCHOLOGY Less than 5% of the adult population is estimated to be entirely unprejudiced. In its most dominant forms it is invisible, institutionalised and an inhibitor of social progress
LICENCE TO HATE A
ccording to a unanimous consensus among all social psychologists, prejudice is a part of everyday life. There is no more dispute concerning the ubiquitous nature of prejudice than there is about the roundness of the earth, the heliocentric model of the solar system, or the germ theory of disease. Prejudice is real, and practically omnipresent; it is found in every culture, nation, institution, family and individual. Even when successfully eradicated, unless something is continuously and actively done to fight it, prejudice will, in most cases, be re-learned. All available psychological research indicates that prejudice is a demonstrable reality and a large influence on all our lives. But despite this consensus on the existence and ubiquity of prejudice, debates conceptualised over a century and a half ago continue to rage within the academic community, concerning the delineation, measurement, and appropriate reaction to prejudice.
cide. Most of us feel like we can recognize prejudice when we see it, but actually answering the question, ‘What is prejudice?’ is trickier than it initially appears. Perhaps prejudice is a matter of disliking others because of their group membership? But then what of groups such as terrorists, child-molesters or bigots? Is it prejudice to dislike members of those groups? The element of ‘dislike’ is also problematic. For example, for most of human history men have ‘liked’ women just fine. But simultane >>
What is prejudice? The term ‘prejudice’ spans an incredibly wide spectrum: from a casual, relative dislike of others to ethnic cleansing and geno-
25 EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2009
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>> ously they have believed that women possess inferior mental, physical and moral capacities. Isn’t this still prejudice, even though there’s no element of ‘dislike’? For the moment, let us assume a definition of prejudice as any human thought, feeling, or behaviour that unfairly or unjustifiably confers advantage or disadvantage on one group relative to others, or on individuals because of their perceived group membership. Even some parts of that definition are hotly contested. Social psychologist, Chris Crandall, does not think that prejudice needs to be ‘unfair’ or ‘unjustified’. In his view all groupbased liking or disliking is essentially the same, and there is no objective standard by which some can be called justified and others unjustified. Beverly Daniel Tatum argues that power should be added to the definition because, without the power to affect the lives of others, prejudice, however strong, loses its meaning. Considering another element of prejudice, we soon realise that it can be either explicit (i.e., the product of introspection) or implicit (somewhat automatic and possibly inaccessible to conscious experience). Sometimes implicit and explicit prejudice are aligned; sometimes they are not. A person can think that she has very favourable attitudes toward homosexuals, but really be teeming with prejudice against them. Prejudice can also be cognitive (i.e., related to thoughts or beliefs), affective (related to feelings or emotions), or behavioural (related to actions). These types of prejudice interact differently. If a very sexist man had a female superior, it is easy to see how he could retain his cognitive and affective prejudice, but, for the sake of job, alter his actions to be behaviourally non-prejudiced. Lastly, prejudice can be individual or institutionalized. Individual prejudice is the easier one to imagine because we’re taught to think of prejudice as individual acts of meanness based on group membership. These include the BNP member who wants all people of South Asian decent to leave Britain and the male professor who refuses to take the work of his female students seriously. However, for contemporary society, institutionalized prejudice might be the bigger, more pervasive, and more consequential form of prejudice. Peggy McIntosh has
EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2009
explained institutionalized prejudice as consisting of invisible systems that confer dominance or advantage on one group and disadvantage on another. Denial is inherent to institutionalized prejudice: to recognize the prejudices that have helped us in our lives removes the illusion of a true meritocracy, and forces us to accept that we are, in some ways, overprivileged. Examples of invisible ‘white privileges’ include never being asked to speak for or represent all members of one’s racial group, finding flesh-coloured plasters that are actually flesh-coloured, and not having to educate one’s children about racism for their own protection. How do we measure prejudice? How you measure prejudice depends a lot on the kind of prejudice you’re hoping to measure. For explicit prejudice the obvious solution is simply to ask. ‘How do you feel towards black people?’; ‘What do you think about homosexuals?’ and so on. Questionnaire measures like that have been used for almost a century to measure attitudes toward one group or another. The latter half of the twentieth century, however, witnessed a global shift in attitudes towards prejudice and an increased reluctance to express prejudiced attitudes. Accurate measurement of explicit attitudes became increasingly difficult. Implicit measures were developed as a response. Techniques vary: priming techniques will present participants with a certain group or representative of that group and then check their reactions. Alternatively, quick-decision tasks can reveal a person’s affective biases. Most popular and influential is the Implicit Association Test, which assesses implicit prejudice toward a wide range of groups. Estimates of the truly non-prejudiced proportion of society are as low as 5%. Members of the public are free to try the Implicit Association Test online (www. implicity.harvard.edu/implicit/demo), although given the statistics don’t be surprised if you dislike what you find. On socially acceptable prejudice Prejudice, like most things, does not remain stable with time. Today the norms of society can be radically transfigured in a fairly compressed time frame. In less than
TOP | Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pictured during the 2008 Presidential elections BELOW | More scenes from Little Rock Central High School
a century, the USA has moved from the prohibition of black and female suffrage to a presidential fight which saw Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both as serious contenders. Our contemporary society is perhaps the most susceptible to rapid modification of societal norms. Just 55 years ago, the NAACP test case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka resulted in the racial desegregation of schools across America. 44 years ago, the Voting Rights Act 1965 was signed in Selma, Alabama, emancipating black US citizens. 15 years ago Nelson Mandela came to power in South Africa, bringing with him the end of apartheid. On September 10th 2001, religious prejudice in the USA was relatively taboo. By September 12th 2001, it was socially acceptable. The change occurred, quite literally, overnight. One consequence of such flexible societal norms is that some forms of prejudice are considered more acceptable than others, even when they are strikingly similar. The same kind of prejudice can be taboo in one country and acceptable in another. So, while the expression of negative attitudes toward homosexual men is generally frowned upon in Britain, in Jamaica, treating gay men equitably leads to ostracism. Popular artists in Jamaica openly profess their anti-homosexual attitudes, whilst Jamaican Prime Minister, Bruce Golding appeared on the BBC talk show Hardtalk in May 2008 saying he would not be pressured by outsiders to recognise homosexual rights. Even more bizarrely, in some places the same type of prejudice can be acceptable when aimed against one group and unacceptable when turned against another. Take the American football team, the Washington Redskins. Their logo is a picture of a Native American, painted an inhuman red and complete with feathers. Their mascot is a person, also painted red, complete with feathers, and sometimes an axe, looking generally fierce. One such mascot, Chief Fullabull, was even known to stab fake pigs just to prove his point. Many Americans, white and black, see nothing wrong with this. But one must note the suspicious lack of football teams called the ‘Blackskins’ or the ‘Yellowskins’. Perhaps the mascots of the former could be painted in 1920’s minstrel fashion? They could savagely spit watermelon seeds and
throw fried chicken legs at the opposing team. And while we’re not being derogatory, the mascots of the latter could be painted yellow, squint, have an enormous overbite, and beat the opposition over the head with a wok. Wouldn’t work, would it? This is because, even in the same country, within a particular category of prejudice (racism here) some groups are fair game whilst others are off-limits. And what of our very own Britain? Socially accepted targets of prejudice here are difficult to identify because the nature of socially acceptable prejudice is that it is so well justified in society that most people don’t see it as prejudice at all, but just as a normal, reasonable reaction to a group of people. Let’s examine one such target – the mentally ill. A recent psychological study estimated that more than half of all Britons feel comfortable saying that people with schizophrenia, for example, are dangerous, unpredictable, difficult to talk to and beyond recovery. These beliefs have no grounding in empirical data. Indeed the reverse is actually true: the mentally ill are much more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than the perpetrators of one. Men with schizophrenia are six times as likely as men without schizophrenia to be murdered. Women with schizophrenia are between three and four times as likely to be raped. Prejudice? Yes, this treatment falls squarely within our definition, as unfair, unjustified and disproportionate. The social acceptability of prejudice presents an obstacle to change, inhibiting the shift in societal norms so described above: unfortunate, insofar as all prejudice disadvantages the entirety of the society in which it is found. The somewhat fatalistic observation of Henry Louis Mencken is perhaps a truism: “One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring”. Also true however, is the fact that a general public aware of its prejudices in all their varied manifestations will be better equipped to lessen them, and more likely to herald the values of equity and human dignity that we all ostensibly so prize. Keon West is a DPhil candidate at Balliol College in the Department of Experimental Psychology
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Illustrations | Rebecca Crompton
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IN MAN’S OWN IMAGE PHILOSOPHY The quest to create a robot in man’s image has led us to examine those very aspects of ourselves that we wish to replicate, and offered rare insights into the mysteries of the human mind
F
rom Hollywood to NASA, the Ministry of Defence to MI5, the human race has great hopes for the future of artificial intelligence. One only has to turn to science fiction to see how man has created a fantasy catalogue of fictional robots, each in some way a projection of our own human characteristics. R2D2, Kryten, HAL 9000, Marvin the paranoid android: all can process audio signals, communicate, usually via speech, reason in specific, as well as general matters, and absorb visual information concerning their local environment. Real artificial intelligence is still some way off from acquiring fully realised versions of these properties. The chief obstacle to their realisation is this: there is some faculty of human intelligence that is so smooth,
so finely tuned, in fact just so plain ubiquitous, that we do not, for the most part, even so much as notice it. Until, that is, we decide to build a robot in possession of the same faculty, when it turns out this previously unnoticed faculty is in fact extremely important and hugely complex. So complex in fact, that researchers will toil over it for decades and decades, inching away at the secret that Nature refuses to impart. Nature, of course, very rarely lets them in on its secrets; artificial intelligence is not a science for the impatient. A neat example of this problem is the human ability to distinguish changes in environment that are important to the task at hand, from those that are insignificant. A human will walk off in the morning to their usual cafe, and immediately take note of >>
29 EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2009
>> important changes such as police roadblocks, thunderstorms, the fact that the cafe is closed, and so forth. The same human will ignore things like a stick on the ground that was not there the day before, or the fact that a car is now parked by the side of the road, or any number of irrelevant changes. A robot, by contrast, will stop in wide-lensed amazement, wobbling on its rollers until its batteries have run dry, because a gate that was closed yesterday is now open half an inch. And so the quest goes on. But the study of artificial intelligence is not all about the robotic recreation of Adam; for every great leap forward made in A.I., more is revealed about the human mind that we have yet to understand. Thus the inverse of the initial problem is also true: a faculty of reasoning can be so ubiquitous and easily intelligible in robotics that it goes nearly unnoticed, but can be nigh on impossible to explain in terms of human behaviour. Aristotelian conceptions of deductive logic provide us with an example of this unusual reversal, where robotic behaviour prompts us to question human reasoning faculties. Aristotle’s system of deductive logic centred on “syllogisms”, reasoning structures that take the following form: Premise 1: All humans are mortal. Premise 2: Socrates is a human. Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
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Deductive logics have moved on from their syllogistic foundations, but the essential point remains unchanged: if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true also. If the conclusion is false, then one or more of the premises must be false also. In other words, deduction concerns consequence, or what follows from what. And arguably, it is a suitably extensive understanding of consequence that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. The reason for the universal utility of deduction for rational humans is straightforward: deduction is informative. Humans engage in acts of deduction in order to acquire information. As straightforward as this fact may be, saying something sensible about the properties and behaviour of the information so deducted by humans is notably less so. You can measure the information gain from an inference for a robot simply by checking the length of the inference after it has been processed, as the longer it is, the more costly, computationally speaking, it was for the robot. You get what you pay for; the more computationally costly an inference is, the greater its informational yield. This area of artificial intelligence is called Algorithmic Information theory. The problem then is this: the translation of any such information theory to human reasoning faculties is nonsensical. There is no way in which the length of a deduction corresponds in any way to the informativeness of that same deduction for a human reasoner. The counterexamples are simple: for one thing, if we could do this, then we could increase the informativeness of a deduction simply by adding irrelevant logical steps to the deduction. But this is obviously silly. Similarly, history is littered with examples of extremely short deductions that have, despite their brevity, absolutely transformed the areas in which they occurred. For a suitably dramatic example, consider Bertrand Russell’s proof of the inconsistency of Gotlob Frege’s attempt to axiomatise all of formal arithmetic into a particular type of logic. During the construction of his system, Frege had proved many
EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2009
History is littered with exa deductions that have, despi transformed the areas i
amples of extremely short ite their brevity, absolutely in which they occurred.
things, at quite some length. The proof of the inconsistency of his system however, fits on about half a page. Despite this, non-mathematicians out there can rest assured that it was the single most informative proof that Frege had ever seen, if not an entirely welcome one. Is there any way then in which we can make a comparable, sensible statement about information gain for human reasoners, in the same way that algorithmic information theory allows us to for robotic deductions? Recent innovations in the field suggest that there may indeed be a solution to the problem with which we are confronted. The Dynamic Turn is a movement in logic, originating in the research conducted at the Institute of Logic, Language, and Computation in Amsterdam. The basic premise of The Dynamic Turn is this: instead of merely examining bodies of information in their final forms, we need to focus on the dynamic processes leading us there – the cognitive interactions that lead us to the conclusions. The action of performing a deductive inference involves just that: an action. It involves cognition on behalf of the deducer. For a human reasoner to get from the premises of a deduction to the conclusion, they must apply the information in the premises to their faculties of reason. This is just a fancy way of saying that they need to think about it. However, to get from the premises to the conclusion, they must think about it in a very particular step-by-step manner. A useful analogy is this: think of a group of people sending each other emails. For the correct information to be passed to each individual, the emails must be sent to the correct people in the correct order. Particular messages may need to be duplicated and sent to multiple people at once at once, or re-sent to a particular person at particular times. In other cases, such re-sending may in fact obstruct the flow of information. The moral from this scenario carries over directly to a single human reasoner. When a person deduces, it will be the case that she often needs to reapply a certain piece of information at crucial points. It will also be the case that the order in which she combines the information she has will be crucial to her deduction. Here, it is not just deductive consequences that are being modelled, but also the dynamic interactions required to bring these consequences about. It is in precisely this sense that The Dynamic Turn impacts our ability to make a sensible statement about information gain for human reasoners, in a manner analogous to that in which algorithmic information theory bears on our being able to say sensible things about robot reasoners. The general issue of information flow in reasoning procedures, although a massive research programme in its own right, is still just a tiny fragment of the much larger task of realising artificial intelligence of the sort that we are so familiar with from fiction. It leads us to examine in detail those very aspects of ourselves that we are trying to replicate mechanically. In the case of the information gain from deduction for human reasoners, we are led to examine a crucial fragment of the rich tapestry of rational actions that underpin our success as rational agents in the natural world. Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson completed his DPhil at Balliol College with the Faculty of Philosophy in 2008. He is presently working in the area of procedural reasoning and dynamic information structures at the University of Leuven, in Belgium. You can read more at his website (www.logic.tsd.net.au) or at www.formal.philosophy.org
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